- From: Rolf H. Nelson <rnelson@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 18:45:48 -0500
- To: www-annotation@w3.org
Laurent gave me permission to forward to the group. In general, I personally prefer to discuss these issues on this archived mailing list, on the grounds that they may be of interest to others besides myself and Laurent. -Rolf ------- Start of forwarded message ------- Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 23:46:27 +0100 From: Laurent Denoue <Laurent.Denoue@univ-savoie.fr> X-Accept-Language: en To: "Rolf H. Nelson" <rnelson@w3.org> Subject: Re: Yawas : new Web annotation system Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="------------6DBCC0851DFD4DB9948385AA" - --------------6DBCC0851DFD4DB9948385AA Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit "Rolf H. Nelson" wrote: > I too would recommend you use a different syntax then your "extended > url" syntax. Using something like > > http://localhost:3128/http://www.yahoo.com?note=selected > > Has the disadvantage that this "extended url" is not a valid url, > according to the url standard. This means there is no guarantee that > future browsers will be able to handle extended url's. > > Therefore at the very least you will want to escape any invalid characters > using the %xx notation. > Yes, I agree. Yawas already escapes special characters like spaces... Also, I know my extended URLs are not a nive solution. Requiring every URL to be preceded by http://localhost:3128 is not that good. What would be good is to use the idea of XPointers, but extending them so as to include other data, not only the anchor point of the XPointer. An extended URL should also use # instead of ?. In Yawas, I've used ? since current browsers don't send to the server the anchor part of an URL. But Yawas needs to get this part, so I've used a ?. In my opinion, an xURL should ressembles XPointers, like : http://www.yahoo.com#note(word1,word2,wordN)date(19990318)comment(I%20am%ok)... Also, since anchor points could include a lot of words, I would suggest that instead of listing every word, one should only encode the first word, then the number of words, and finally the last word. It should be enough to make it unique in one document. Currently, you can export annotations from Yawas using a "Copy" command : this creates an xURL in the form I've just proposed. So you can paste the xURLs anywhere (email, web pages, word documents,...). To see the annotation, you first need to "import" this annotation in Yawas. Yawas will have an "Import" button which will scan the content of the clipboard for any xURL. All the xURLs which are found will be added to the annotation database and then could be visualized on the browser by clicking "View". This is a little more complicated than directly clicking on the XURL, but since current browser don't understand XURLs, this is a first solution. I wish I had time to write an extension to IExplorer so that it can understand xURLs. I've written Yawas as part of my PhD thesis where I needed a system to highlight Web pages. Yawas works well as a research prototype for both Netscape and IExplorer on Windows (earlier versions worked with everything but did not support frames). Here is a screenshot of the current Yawas interface where 3 annotation for page http://java.sun.com/... have been selected. [Image] Here is the result in a Netscape window once the user has clicked on "View" in Yawas (see above) : [Image] I think current bookmark programs have a big problem in that they only let users keep URLs, not the information read by users in those pages. I'll try to show that an highlighting tool could help people retrieve information in their own information space, and better browse it. It could also help people to cooperate : where today they send URLs, they could send xURLs and the recipients could see the highlighted parts which are of interest. Do you think that extending XPointers with other datas is a reasonable idea ? In my opinion, important metadata could be : - -the document type (paper, poem, source code...: see Dublin Core working group) - - the comment type. Best regards, Laurent.
Received on Tuesday, 23 March 1999 18:45:49 UTC