Re: Orphaned annotations

On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, Marja-Riitta Koivunen wrote:

> First, the amount of problems depends on what kinds of changes are made to
> the page and how well id's are used.

Of course it does!

If IDs are used for all elements, then we can happily reference them -
provided we don't have an editor that moves them around!  But an ID
gives us an element (or attribute): trying to extend it to a range
as Annotea does[1] is problematic.

>	 Sometimes updates can cause only  minor
> problems e.g. many reviewing changes are often local and the annotation
> stays pretty much in the right area even after changing the document

That's why I suggested a method for measuring document change
(or more precisely, a family of equivalence measures).

> Second, how to change the status of annotations either manually or
> automatically as part of the review process is an interesting problem and
> we have been discussing about couple of approaches (in our future to do
> list). If there are use cases, ideas, solutions etc. we are interested in
> hearing about them.

OK, I think you should separate the manual and automatic cases.  Doing
it manually is just a case of a software tool maintaining dependency
information and basic housekeeping.  I find the automated situation
more interesting: for example, if a document has changed, I want to
be able to detect which annotations are affected and should be
archived off or flagged for human attention.  The person doing the

[1] Yes I know XPointer does that too.  There are cases when you *can*
meaningfully refer to a range; my point it that to try and do so in
the presence of change is not sensible.

-- 
Nick Kew

Site Valet - the mark of Quality on the Web.
<URL:http://valet.webthing.com/>

Received on Monday, 18 March 2002 15:27:54 UTC