Re: bookmarklet: resubmission

On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 10:50:02AM -0700, Laurent Denoue wrote:
> 
> Talking about XPointers to anchor annotations, I'm not sure that using IDs
> is a good idea: users do not expect annotations to remain on the document if
> the CONTENT has changed! Imagine you highlight a title in the CNN home page.
> The next day, the title will be different, but you will still get your OLD
> annotation.
> Of course, there might be cases when people want to explicitely attach
> annotations to the structure of the document, although I cannot find
> compelling examples. But in the general case, people attach annotations to
> the CONTENT.

I guess your comment is not as much about using XPointer, but about attaching
the annotation to the structure of a document. You can make an XPointer
expression that points to the content of an element.

> So you may use IDs in the document to help the algorithm locate those
> annotations, but you should also use CONTENT (and in my opinion, CONTENT
> should remain the main heuristic).

In some cases, you want to annotate the content. In other cases,
like Len noted, you want to annotate the structure. In other cases, you
don't have the choice. Imagine if you're  annotating an SVG image or
a MathML expression (you can do both with Amaya today). It all depends on
the type of document (static, dynamic, legacy, working draft, ...) and the 
kind of annotations you want to generate. In my view, we should be very 
flexible on this issue to not limit annotations to one kind of application.

The problem that must be solved in either case is to be able to detect
when an annotation becomes orphan or misleading. XPointer has some provisions,
such as specifying a chain of XPointers, where you would go thru each link
of the chain until you find an expression that resolves to something. However,
the real work is in making those elegant XPointer expressions which are
short and correct.

> You could also read the paper from Microsoft "Robust Annotation Positioning
> in Digital Documents." available at
> http://www.research.microsoft.com/coet/

Thanks for the URL. I'll read the paper and comment on it later.

-jose

Received on Thursday, 19 April 2001 04:48:06 UTC