this will fundamentally change the internet
This could be great news for platform interoperability and the open web.
Annotation is now a web standard
11–20 of 164 posts
Re: Annotation is now a web standard
#12I spent about 40 hours in December and January implementing a browser extension for Chrome and a server that speak the web annotation protocol and use the web annotation data model in this specification.
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.
Re: Annotation is now a web standard
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It would be great to also get notified as discussion is happening in the various sites, without reading the spec, it's not clear to me if that's part of the standard. Not really.
"The Publisher receives a notification for any annotations made on their site which are explicitly published publicly. There are two proposed mechanisms for this: 1) a client-side event which informs the page of the annotation's publication URLs; 2) a server-side notification sent to the publisher's “well-known” contact address. Either or both of these mechanisms may be used, each with its own use cases." https://www…
Read the W3C Recommendations for the protocol and data model. Neither has any mention whatsoever of a notification or alert:
https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-protocol/
https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/
Any type of notification would be an extra feature performed by annotation software, but is not a part of the specification.
Your annotation client could query the annotation server at a known endpoint for new annotations. The results should be ordered and paginated, but the order and pagination used seem to be at the discretion of individual implementations.
Re: Annotation is now a web standard
#14I like the idea of an inherent ability for annotations to exist, but I think the glue will still be annotation (read: comment) vendors. My head hurts trying to conceive of existing commenting platforms facilitating this - especially since they exist in large part due to these ease of integration thanks to their walled central storage. That said, the door for disruption is much more open than before.
Re: Annotation is now a web standard
#15this will fundamentally change the internet
(if its used)
Re: Annotation is now a web standard
#16Does it do anything to prevent spam?
Re: Annotation is now a web standard
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The Publisher receives a notification for any annotations made on their site which are explicitly published publicly. There are two proposed mechanisms for this: 1) a client-side event which informs the page of the annotation's publication URLs; 2) a server-side notification sent to the publisher's “well-known” contact address. Either or both of these mechanisms may be used, each with its own use cases." https://www…
Read the W3C Recommendations for the protocol and data model. Neither has any mention whatsoever of a notification or alert: https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-protocol/ https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ Any type of notification would be an extra feature performed by annotation software, but is not a part of the specification. Your annotation client could query the annotation server at a known endpoint for new an…
Hm... that would be really sad.
Re: Annotation is now a web standard
#18I spent about 40 hours in December and January implementing a browser extension for Chrome and a server that speak the web annotation protocol and use the web annotation data model in this specification. 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 presen…
I'm not sure where else to complain so I will just leave this example here. I was frustrated reading the specification because it contradicts itself.
The data model has a required field called `id` which is an IRI (like a URI) that is basically a globally unique identifier.
The protocol allows an annotation to be transmitted without the `id` field attached.
Why? Is the field required or not.
In my toy implementation I had my browser client attach a v4 UUID as the `id` field before sending it to my server. But it would have still been valid without it.
Re: Annotation is now a web standard
#19Is anyone using these? The blog post is put out by a company I've never heard of, and the credits listed on it include nobody who works on a browser, no major websites, and no comment-widget company.
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.
Re: Annotation is now a web standard
#20This is interesting. I hope it doesn't slow things down too much or become another spam vector.
Aside: That interactive SVG slide-show is pretty impressive in itself.