Date: Thu, 19 Nov 92 15:20:14 +0100 From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch> Message-Id: <9211191420.AA00523@www3.cern.ch> To: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen) Subject: Annotation in WWW Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch Marc, You ask a good question. Currently, all we do with existing WWW software is as you describe: you need write access to annote it. See www http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/DesignIssues/LinkToLiving.html and www http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/DesignIssues/Multiuser.html for discussions in this area. We would like to include facilities in the new protocol to allow front-end update. One observation I have made is that many nodes are basically lists, and the option to add a link to the list could be a simple and safer operation than allowing full write acess. The function would be annotate(docid1, docid2) which would, in the simplest hypertext case, add a bit of text to the end of doc1 consisting of the title of doc2, linked to doc2 itself. This function would give allow a "reply" feature when used on a mail message. For a newsgroup, it would equate to "post". obviously it would be up to a server how it would impelement it (ity could maintain alphabestical order for example, it could store the links in a separate databse, it could formatthem anyway) -- the requirement would only be that at the end, a link from doc1 to doc2 existed. I'd be interested in CSCW people getting involved with the web. Certain servers could for example mention their ability to support concurrent editing of documents for clients which support that. Tim