Annotation is now a web standard

Historically, web standards where a committee gets together and decides how a feature is going to look without the buy-in of users or browser vendors have a very poor track record of adoption. The way actually-successful web features get standardized is that users start clamoring for it, which leads someone to build a hacked-up JS implementation of it, which leads to a company founded around that hacked-up JS implementation, which leads to competition, which leads to browser vendors building it into the browser, which leads to an open standard.

Trying to skip steps doesn't seem to work. If you build the feature without users who want it, nobody will use it. If you build the company without the prototype, you won't get a working implementation. If you build it into the browser when there's a dominant monopoly company, people will continue to use the company rather than the browser's version (this is the story of Google vs. IE+Bing & Facebook vs. RSS & semantic web). If you standardize it before it's been adopted by multiple browsers, people will ignore the standard (this is the story of RDF, the semantic web, and countless other W3C features that have fallen into the dustbin of history).

And if any one of those parties are not at the table when the standard is written, they'll ignore the standard anyway.

It was very easy to pass the tests the W3C working group used to verify that they had two working implementations of the data model and protocol. Most of the test default to passing if the specified tag is not present. Basically, it's not clear whether a serious, real attempt to use this has been made. I'm unconvinced that the specification is robust enough to be useful without ending up with a lot of vendor lock-in.

The toy extension was playing around with using these annotations to alert publishers and potentially other users of typos in their articles and pages. It would be nice to have a side channel to report typos other than just using the comment section or trying to find an email address. Will the "meta web" ever catch on?

I never published it but I still might add a page about my experience on my website. I have posted about the idea there before.

What happens if the content changes? Random example: Someone highlights a picture of salad and notes "my favorite food!" and then the publisher changes the image to show roadkill instead of salad.

Services like hypothes.is can do some filtering automatically, but this is missing the level above that - editorial privileges on comments on your own domain.

In my opinion this will open up the web immensely and make the web much more democratic, will be interesting to see how major players react.

I have been working with the hypothes.is folks for almost 2 years and have been using hypothes.is for manual tagging and automated annotation so I'm a bit biased. I have seen criticism that the standardization process was premature but given how hard it is to get browser vendors to implement things I think this could make a difference. That said, the way Microsoft did their annotation in Edge was just to take pictures of sites.

One of my hopes is that things like annotation can pull us back from the brink of the javascript apocalypse since it is very hard to annotate arbitrary states of a running program.

Is this really how long it takes to realize something like this? Sort of boggles my mind.

http://imgur.com/FgsyAco

then you could annotate legal documents, code, and other high-density texts as well.

I've long felt that existing solutions fall down in a few ways:

1. UX -- this is a HARD UX problem because you are potentially managing a lot of information on screen at once. Anybody staring at a blizzard of comments in Word or Acrobat knows how bad this can get.

2. One-to-one -- Most existing exegesis solutions like genius.com only let you mark of one portion of text for threaded commentary, which is not ideal because complex text like the above example can have multiple patterns working in it at the same time:

http://imgur.com/x6BKKQW (a crude attempt to map assonance and consonance)

Really, what a robust commentary system needs is to map many comments to many units of text, so that the same portion of text can be annotated multiply (as this solution attempts) but also so that the same comment can be used to describe multiple portions of text as well.

3. Relationships between comments -- It's great that this solution gives threaded comments as a first-class feature, but you also want to be able to group comments together in arbitrary ways and be able to show and hide them. In my examples above, there are two systems at work: the ideational similarities between words, and the patterns of assonance / consonance. You could also add additional systems on top of this: glossing what words or phrases mean (and in Shakespeare, these are often multiple), or providing meta-commentary on textual content relative to other content, or even social commentary on the commentaries. You need a way to manage hierarchies or groups of content to do this effectively. No existing solution that I am aware of attempts this.

I literally just hired somebody yesterday to start work on a text editor that attempts to resolve some of this, but it's an exceedingly hard problem to solve with technology.

* About a year and a half ago, I thought about getting into this field. I built http://lederboard.com as a result - it works pretty well, actually (plenty of bugs behind the curtain) but the idea was to try and open it up as a standard.

* If I do pick lederboard up again, I will likely convert it to use this open standard.

* My goal was always to have the 'features' of lederboard not be in the annotations themselves, but in the moderator controls, the ability to follow sites and specific users, etc., and to basically act like reddit-enhancement-suite for an internet-wide commenting system.

* However, I realized this was a truly tremendous mountain to climb. Like, crazily huge. So I wound up going in a different direction.

In any event, I think that the guys at Genius should take note of this and consider it very seriously. They raised a whole lot of money and, as far as I can tell, this is a direct shot across their bow and it has the backing of W3C, which is huge. I am pretty happy I didn't wind up in the middle of that fight. Though maybe I might get back into at some point.

In the meantime, I am focusing on easy-to-use encryption: http://gibber.it . I think that is probably a little more important right now. For background, I am a practicing attorney with a pretty substantial practice in software, startups, corporate finance and information law.

You'd think we'd have learned our lesson by now. Free speech, by awful people, is overrated and can result in disasters.

[1] sample chapter, http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/programming-with-monad...

Currently, negative information (even if true) isn't as easily discoverable. This ties it all to every one of your pages. With, as far as I can tell, no direct control over moderation.

I suspect many website owners are more concerned about legit complaints that aren't easily discovered than they are about spam.

And, once reputation mgmt creeps in, that good (but negative) information will be buried with astroturfed annotations.

How much private data about my browser and my host am I leaving when an annotation is created?

Is there a practical way to delete these both from the page and the public record, or would they be stored in perpetuity?

P.S. This url - https://hypothes.is/register - accessible from most pages by clicking "sign up" in the top-right corner, presents an error and doesn't redirect anywhere. https://hypothes.is/signup works fine, however.

I think that proper installation instructions,perhaps with docker compose, are more important than blog posts about annotation importance.

Aside: That interactive SVG slide-show is pretty impressive in itself.

Somebody will post a slanderous comment on a company's website, the company will be very unhappy, and sue the comment provider for blending the comment into the company's website.

Is that free speech? Or is the comment not protected, because it's shown on the company's website, and thus should be under the company's control?

https://www.w3.org/annotation/diagrams/annotation-architectu...

An easy prediction: with wide usage of this, any page that generates a non-trivial amount of traffic will be in such a state as to make reading the annotations pointless at best.

However, this thing is just completely illegible without reading glasses and 150% zoom... and it's still uncomfortable even then.

I would be surprised if this company has anyone age 40 or up who actually looks at their own website on a regular basis.

First, the core concept of associative indexing:

Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass... The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.

Introducing the memex:

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

Associating one item with another is the essence of the memex:

This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item.

Adding one's own annotations and links, and then sharing them to colleagues, is the vision:

First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.

And his trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a friend turns to the queer ways in which a people resist innovations, even of vital interest. He has an example, in the fact that the outraged Europeans still failed to adopt the Turkish bow. In fact he has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will, stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail.

Arguably we still do not have a satisfactory realization of the memex. The Web is not quite it; nor the personal Wiki, nor the personal mind-mapper, though each comes close. Perhaps the web with annotations will realize the dream? Though note that Tim Berners-Lee recognized in 1995 that even with a Memex, we might fail to organize our larger technical and social structures: "We have access to information: but have we been solving problems?"

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

[2] https://www.w3.org/Talks/9510_Bush/Talk.html

Adoption is always the question that matters most to the public; arguably TBL's mid-2000s vision for the web as a Giant Global Graph [3] has been neatly cloned and co-opted by Facebook's concrete, incompatible, and inward-flowing Hotel California implementation [4], but if a new wave of startups and bigcorps can create a rich ecosystem using community-designed standards, the outcome may be different this time. Or maybe not, but I applaud and support them in trying, and I will evangelize the same.

What's different from the mid-2000s, you ask? For one, the ideas behind REST, despite often imperfectly or incompletely applied, have nonetheless entered community consciousness. Hard-fail-if-invalid attitudes have been replaced by a tolerance for imperfections, both in the community's rejection of XML-derived data formats, and an acceptance of the web's often haphazard, something-is-better-than-nothing nature. APIs implemented using HTTP over the Web are a mainstay instead of experimental integratons, and a new wave of commercial players is eager to exploit whatever competitive advantage against the incumbents.

The big content gardens have all pushed incompatible "protocols" (we call them APIs, but they behave like protocols) [5], which gives them network effects but also locks them (deliberately) out of the open web (i.e. a Facebook comment on a Facebook post that was spawned by sharing a web link is not a comment on the link; it's a comment on that Facebook post). Meanwhile, systems that can build on top of these standards to implement two-way data flow -- both inward and out -- can present richer experiences, while not precluding the usual business models and monetization schemes that are in use today. And even if commercially this all flops, we'll have nice specs and vocabularies to use where metadata is paramount: science, research, government, and the like.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/ [2] https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html [3] http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/215 [4] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/overview/ [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12893852