Re: Orphaned annotations

 "Jose Kahan" <jose.kahan@w3.org>
> On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 02:41:39PM -0000, Jim Ley wrote:
> >
> > id's simply aren't used though, for example one might expect
> > http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea to be authored with a nod towards
making
> > Annotation easy, yet
> >
> Thanks for your remarks concerning the Annotea page. Yes, we could have
> added ID pointers, but this slipped by.

My complaints are not about the Annotea page, I was using that as an
example of perhaps the best quality page for annotations, yet it still
has problems, I was using it to highlight the weakness in Fuzzy Pointers
(I don't think either your changes over time as evidenced by
web.archive.org are inappropriate)

> We have never tried to hide this limitation of XPointer. You call them
> fuzzy pointers, but in reality, it's a limitation of XPointer.

I call them Fuzzy Pointers becuase the documents they are used on are
_HTML_ and XPointer isn't defined for anything other than XML and we're
relying on HTML normilasations being similar enough that we can use them
between different parses.

> - orphan annotations: an annotation can't be attached anymore to a
document.
> - misleading annotations (this is what you refer to as fuzzy pointers).
>   An annotation is attached to a wrong place in the document.

There is no solution to either of these problems and that is what we
need, it seems to me that XPointer isn't a solution to providing context
in HTML resource. (Sean Palmer has also raised problems with any context
information surviving HTTP content-negotiation
http://someurl/#xpointer(...)  only applies to one representation of the
resource, rather than the resource itself.

> The consensus seems to be that it's better to have orphan
> annotations than a possibility of misleading annotations. This is an
open
> research item and we would like to have a contribution coming from the
> annotations community.

Within the Evaluation and Repair group we've discussed checking when
resources have changed and the extent of those changes - similar
mechanisms I think are needed in Annotea so you know if a resource is
likely orphaned through the document structure changes.

Jim.

Received on Monday, 18 March 2002 12:24:50 UTC