Re: Annotations futures

Nathan Torkington (Nathan.Torkington@vuw.ac.nz)
Tue, 10 Aug 1993 10:39:49 +1200


John Danner writes:

> I haven't been following this discussion at all, but using
> character-offsets seems like a pretty weak mechanism for marking
> annotation positions when you have the SGML structure of a document
> lying around.

Fair enough. Instead of character-position offsets, do you mean
fourth H1
third H2
second para

Is that enough detail for the annotation?

> Our experience on Oracle Book, a commercial hypertext system, is
> that except for electronic review situations, authors will not take
> responsibility for repositioning annotations.

This sounds reasonable. I think this means the annotations (as
stored) should have an md-5 digital signature of the original document
to enable the client to say ``this is an annotation of an EARLIER
version''. I don't think full versioning is possible, given the
limitations of the resolution of HTML's semantics.

Nat