Re: The Standards Manifesto - some Annotea comments

"Marja-Riitta Koivunen" <marja@w3.org>
> - Annotea is flexible and extensible in many ways. Users can define new
> annotation types that they want to use in a specific working group.

Absolutely, I've found it extremely flexible, I'm already annotating
raster images and SVG with Annotea, there are some problems with orphaned
annotations which need resolving, but there is the flexibility.

> The purpose of annotation servers is to make manageable islands of
> annotation metadata. Having everyone on the web see all possible
> annotations anyone has ever made from any viewpoint has some scalability
> problems as well.

and an human information overload problem quite apart from the technical
aspects, the suggestion that NNTP+annotation is a reasonable model denies
the fact that annotations are generally more ephemeral than news articles,
but even within that there's no reason why a suitable distribution
mechanism similar (or even using) nntp can't be done between these
annotation islands for comments that are more persistent and of
substance - most annotations are pointers to other resources, or simple
corrections, they simply don't have the value of even a usenet post.

> It would be great if MS would integrate a nice annotation ui for IE that
> would be interoperable with Annotea annotations. Jim Ley's work and the
> Sharepoint ui seem to be good starting points.

Snufkin (My IE interface to annotea, amongst other things) has always been
my private toy and browser, it's not robust it's never intended to be -
it's my toy, I'm surprised people have even looked.  The annotea portion
is perhaps a couple of hours of development I'd be shocked if anyone was
using as their primary browser (even I only use it perhaps 30% of the
time, but have simpler IE modifications for the rest of the time.)  I only
made it available because it could be useful to some, and if people are
interested in making it robust I'd be glad to work with them - Annotea is
very simple to implement, if you've got an RDF parser, some simple
querying and something that can talk http it's there, but Snufkin is not a
robust way of doing it - it's a toy and has a poor UI - as I've said many
times today "I can't do UI".

I feel guilty now that Annotea has been looked down upon based on my
implementation, it was never serious, it's just my toy that normally
I'd've never told anyone about it's not release quality - I'd suggest what
you can achieve in a couple of hours shows some of the strengths of
Annotea.

Cheers,

Jim.

Received on Friday, 24 May 2002 17:16:28 UTC