Re: W3C collaboration web site

On Fri, 9 Jul 1999, Karen MacArthur wrote:
> 
> I'd like to start collecting material for the W3C
> collaboration/annotation web site.  If people send me pointers to
> their research, perhaps with a short abstract, I'll start putting them
> together and forward it to Dan LaLiberte at W3C.

Hello, Karen.  Thanks very much for doing this.  I guess i'll
contribute the reference to the Crit project.

CritLink is an open-source project that permits annotations to be
made on any phrase in any web page by any user using any browser.
The service and the source code have been available since July 1997.
No software needs to be installed in order to use Crit; rather, Crit
applies a mediator architecture to make this annotation capability
accessible to any form-capable client.  Anybody can use the public
service at http://crit.org/; the software is provided just so that
anyone wanting to run their own private Crit service can do so (for
example, on a company intranet).

Annotations in CritLink are first-class web documents that can be
themselves annotated, permitting discussion threads to spring up
anywhere.  This also means that annotations can be stored publicly
or privately on any website and password-protected if necessary,
using exactly the same mechanisms as for any web page.  In addition,
as a side benefit of the way annotations are connected to their
target with normal HTML links, CritLink permits the discovery of
existing backward links from pages it has seen.  Users can ask 
CritLink to monitor pages for new links and get notification in
e-mail when a new backward link is found, whether it is a normal
"coarse-grained" link or an annotation on the page being monitored.

To use Crit, simply visit http://crit.org.  The documentation and
source code are also available at that site.



-- ?!ng

"Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember."
    -- Oscar Levant

Received on Thursday, 26 August 1999 12:07:56 UTC