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Annotation is now a web standard

hypothes.is

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Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#31

Post by gaxun »

gsnedders wrote: post #28
gaxun wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm not sure where else to complain so I will just leave this example here. All of the specs, in their "Status of the Document" section, say: > This document was published by the Web Annotation Working Group as a Recommendation. If you wish to make comments regarding this document, please send them to public-annotation@w3.org (subscribe, archives). All comments are welcome. I'd guess, therefore, you should complain…

I tried emailing two of the names listed at the time, for two different purposes. I got a little bit of a response from one, nothing from the other.

I read the "rules" for W3C groups and in order to actually participate you need to be a member of a big organization and all this other stuff. I'm not sure anyone would have listened.

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#32

Post by gsnedders »

gaxun wrote: post #29
gsnedders wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely implement it; they're one of the implementations used to show implementation experience of the Web Annotations Model per the implementation report linked to from the W3C Recommendation.

As I mentioned in another comment, these tests can be trivially passed. You just paste in some JSON data. To pass "all" the tests you actually only need to implement a small handful of the fields. The rest of the tests are qualified by something like "if present" -- so you pass those by just not having anything present in your test case. When I use the hypothes.is extension, I see queries in my browser's developer co…

As far as I'm aware, there's nothing in the spec that prohibits extensions to the set of fields, provided they use the required fields in their required way.

Of course, you run the risk that you end up with de-facto standards and everyone having to implement one implementation's extensions (oh, hi WebKit-prefixed properties!).

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#33

Post by gaxun »

gsnedders wrote: post #32
gaxun wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I mentioned in another comment, these tests can be trivially passed. You just paste in some JSON data. To pass "all" the tests you actually only need to implement a small handful of the fields. The rest of the tests are qualified by something like "if present" -- so you pass those by just not having anything present in your test case. When I use the hypothes.is extension, I see queries in my browser's developer co…

As far as I'm aware, there's nothing in the spec that prohibits extensions to the set of fields, provided they use the required fields in their required way. Of course, you run the risk that you end up with de-facto standards and everyone having to implement one implementation's extensions (oh, hi WebKit-prefixed properties!).

> there's nothing in the spec that prohibits extensions to the set of fields

Correct. But since it has all this "JSON-LD" stuff baked in, you need to also carefully define and publish the extra fields.

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#34

Post by gsnedders »

gaxun wrote: post #31
gsnedders wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure where else to complain so I will just leave this example here. All of the specs, in their "Status of the Document" section, say: > This document was published by the Web Annotation Working Group as a Recommendation. If you wish to make comments regarding this document, please send them to public-annotation@w3.org (subscribe, archives). All comments are welcome. I'd guess, therefore, you should complain…

I tried emailing two of the names listed at the time, for two different purposes. I got a little bit of a response from one, nothing from the other. I read the "rules" for W3C groups and in order to actually participate you need to be a member of a big organization and all this other stuff. I'm not sure anyone would have listened.

Almost all W3C groups nowadays do almost all their work in public on public mailing lists; actually being a member of the WG is rarely a requirement for participation.

And if it was sent between the spec becoming a Candidate Recommendation and going to Proposed Recommendation, it must (in theory) have been addressed. If not, something's gone wrong process-wise with how the group was operating (and from poking around a bit, it seems likely it did). Le sigh. :\

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#35

Post by gaxun »

gsnedders wrote: post #34
gaxun wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried emailing two of the names listed at the time, for two different purposes. I got a little bit of a response from one, nothing from the other. I read the "rules" for W3C groups and in order to actually participate you need to be a member of a big organization and all this other stuff. I'm not sure anyone would have listened.

Almost all W3C groups nowadays do almost all their work in public on public mailing lists; actually being a member of the WG is rarely a requirement for participation. And if it was sent between the spec becoming a Candidate Recommendation and going to Proposed Recommendation, it must (in theory) have been addressed. If not, something's gone wrong process-wise with how the group was operating (and from poking around…

Thank you for the explanation. This has been my only experience with the W3C system and as an outsider it was very intimidating. I'm certainly willing to accept the idea that I wasn't going about things the right way or understanding what I was reading!

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#36

Post by state »

I first met someone working on hypothes.is at a party about, I don't know, eight years ago? Ten years ago? They pitched me more or less this exact idea. It seemed interesting at the time.

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

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#37

Post by gsnedders »

gaxun wrote: post #35
gsnedders wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all W3C groups nowadays do almost all their work in public on public mailing lists; actually being a member of the WG is rarely a requirement for participation. And if it was sent between the spec becoming a Candidate Recommendation and going to Proposed Recommendation, it must (in theory) have been addressed. If not, something's gone wrong process-wise with how the group was operating (and from poking around…

Thank you for the explanation. This has been my only experience with the W3C system and as an outsider it was very intimidating. I'm certainly willing to accept the idea that I wasn't going about things the right way or understanding what I was reading!

Many of the smaller, newer groups with fewer people with a background in the W3C end up being somewhat dysfunctional and with odd processes and that almost certainly makes it feel harder to participate than it should be.

From prodding around a bit (notably [0], which sadly is in Member-only space, but plenty of administrivia is there, and in principle no technical work for almost all groups), it seems like every issue reported to the Working Group (regardless of where) should have ended up with a GitHub issue, with [1] being meant to have been all issues while the specs were in CR.

Pointing in the specs to a mailing list to report issues, and then relying on someone to copy them into GitHub, seems doomed to fail: it's far, far too easy for one thing to not get copied. Really the "Status of the Document" should've pointed to GitHub for new issues being filed (possibly with a fallback to the mailing list for those unable to use GitHub for organisational or other reasons).

[0]: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/chairs/2016OctDec/0143.... [1]: https://github.com/w3c/web-annotation/milestone/3?closed=1

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#38

Post by tedmiston »

nostrademons wrote: post #19

Is 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…

> Is anyone using these?

Annotations? Definitely. At least one member of the Hypothesis team came from Genius (formerly Rap Genius) which is the largest annotation service on the web.

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#39

Post by hyperion2010 »

Congrats to all the hypothes.is folks and everyone who worked on this!

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.

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#40

Post by detaro »

bluejekyll wrote: post #2

I think this is great news. As someone who blogs irregularly, I don't want to spend a ton of time integrating each discussion area into my site. This seems like it could lead to a very elligent way to automatically get that integration. 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.

For notification of comments on other pages you might be interested in the Webmention spec (which is a lot simpler and has some active use already), which is a modernized take on pingbacks by the community around indieweb.org: https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention (There even are tools already to get notifications about twitter mentions etc. via it)
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