Re: [Laurent.Denoue@univ-savoie.fr: Re: Yawas : new Web annotation system]

    > ------- 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"

    > In my opinion, an xURL should ressembles XPointers, like :
    > http://www.yahoo.com#note(word1,word2,wordN)date(19990318)comment(I%20am%ok)...

    > 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.

Laurent,

XPointer does indeed have some advantages over the minimalist pointing
you currently use to reference a portion of a web document.  See
<http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-xptr-req#Lure> for a description of these
advantages, which include robustness, reuse, and a way to deal with
dynamically generated documents.  

There is a natural overlap between the requirements for a powerful
inline annotation system and XPointer.  

However, if you do decide to leverage the XPointer work, I would
advise embedding the XPointer inside a URL rather than embedding the
annotation inside an XPointer and ending up with a new construct that
is neither a URL nor an XPointer.  

For example, your syntax could have URLs of the form

    http://<annotation_prefix>?note=<encoded_xpointer>&comment=<encoded_comment>

Suppose that you wanted to annotate part of the main Yahoo document
and use your local annotation server on port 3003 to add the comment
"hello world" in the middle of the document.  Your annotation prefix
is "localhost:3003/".  Your XPointer is
"http://www.yahoo.com#note(word1,word2,wordN)".  Your URL would be

   http://localhost:3003/?note=http%xx%xx%xxwww.yahoo.com%xxnote(word1,word2,wordN)&comment=hello%xxworld

If you don't have a local annotation server but don't care about
privacy, perhaps some generous soul has set up an annotation server
for all the world to use, with an annotation prefix of
"annotation.com/cgi-bin/anno", in which case you could view your
marked up document by pasting the following into any browser:

       http://annotation.com/cgi-bin/anno?note=http%xx%xx%xxwww.yahoo.com%xxnote(word1,word2,wordN)&comment=hello%xxworld



-- 
| Rolf Nelson (rolf@w3.org), Project Manager, W3C at MIT
|   "Try to learn something about everything
|             and everything about something."  --Huxley

Received on Friday, 2 April 1999 17:54:20 UTC