Re: about CritLink and annotation systems in general

On Fri, Aug 27, 1999 at 01:00:39PM -0400, Jon Garfunkel wrote:
> 
> I don't think it's beneficial to focus on Crit or any singular product on
> this list.

I mentioned it partially as a point of reference which people were
familiar with, and because it is the one I personally am most
familiar with.  I would like to point out that since Crit is
already open source software with alot of functionality, that it
would be perfect for adaptation as a reference implementation of
any protocols which this list (or latter efforts) might come up
with.

> I think our energies are far better directed towards working on agreeing on
> what set of features comprise an "annotation system."

Hmm.  Ouch.  If we don't even know what we're talking about I
guess I'm *really* premature suggesting possible projects and
implementations.  :-)

You're correct though - I had assumed that people had agreed that
"annotations" were simply focused links from one "source" to part
of a web page.  Thinking back to what I've read here, this idea
might be incompatible with the "dictionary" annotations, where
people were essentially annotating individual words, not pages.

So what *are* annotations?

> >	- Crit is a bottleneck.  It's wasteful of resources, and therefore
> >	  slow for me to fetch local pages using a remote server.
> 
> Ping has acknowledged this before. A proxy solution is a good prototype,
> but not scaleable to many users, and not compliant with conventional URL
> space.

Actually, a proxy solution doesn't have to have either problem.
That's why I emphasized "local", but didn't use a different word
for "proxy".  A local proxy is just a "proxy" which you run on
your local machine, and configure your browser to talk to it, not
directly to the WWW or a remote proxy server (e.g. the one on your
firewall).

The proxy I was suggesting just rewrites the pages, by inserting
new links and/or decorations - it doesn't need to alter the URLs
since the user is using the browser's built-in proxy feature to
pass all requests through it anyway.  Therefore it doesn't have
any problems whatsoever with the current URL space.

It just needs a protocol to talk to annotation servers, and a
method for locating the annotation servers which are appropriate
for a given web page (or whatever, assuming people figure out how
to annotate e.g. pictures or audio streams).

This is in fact a key point - these protocols could be trivial.
Really, really trivial.  The location protocol could simply
involve adding a single tag to web-page or HTTP headers, which
points to a preferred annotation service for the file requested
(the pointer could be a WWW URL). The data transmission protocol
could simply be HTTP requests to the specified URL, and an
agreed-upon format for the reply.

> collected and prepared for the user; "local proxy" sounds too much like
> "server proxy" (one instance of that being the CritLink Mediator).

It sounds the same, because it is the same.  Only the location and
client<->proxy protocol are different, which just happens to cure
all the major problems with the "server proxy" model.

It's an idea so simple that a prototype could coded in a matter of
days in Perl - assuming the protocols were finalized.

Anyway I apologize if my post was too implementation oriented for
this forum.  I'll just go back to work now.  :-)


Ping:  If you're listening.. please consider this a feature request?

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson                           PGP: 02764305, B7A3AB89
 bre@netverjar.is           -><-           http://www.mmedia.is/~bre/

Received on Friday, 27 August 1999 15:29:21 UTC