Re: [h2o-discuss] meta-discussions

[Wendy Seltzer <wendy@seltzer.com>]

Sounds great to me!

Hyperlinking currently allows us to make direct references among existing
works, or, if we have a full-fledged idea (and a webserver), to create a
new work linking back to its sources.  Annotation, as I see it, could be an
intermediate step -- allowing people to add brief ideas to an ongoing
discussion, scholarly criticism around an otherwise static piece, or
commentary on a work-in-progress.  With an open source annotation protocol,
anyone could set up an annotation server with its own database to hold
these conversations in public or private. 

I had set up an early, and slow, prototype (pre ThirdVoice!) of an
annotation proxy, thinking that online courses could use such a tool for
assigned reading and marginal notes.  The proxy and its perl scripts are
online at <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projects/annotate.html> .  A
browser plugin would probably be faster, if less portable.  It would be
great to start a full-fledged h2o project -- and before Microsoft captures
the field with proprietary "interactive document publishing" in Office 2000.

As to standards, the most immediate need I can see is a better way of
describing position in HTML documents.  Pegging comments to text phrases is
slow, and can be ambiguous for longer documents. 

--Wendy

At 11:24 PM 7/15/99 -0400, garf@look.boston.ma.us wrote:
>Seems that sometimes this email list *wants* to be a meta-media system like
>Slashdot... or even ThirdVoice, which has a much nicer interface. That is to
>say, when we're not all agreeing on the virtues of open source, we are
>giving pointers to, and sometimes even making comments on, news items.
>
...
>I'd have time to work on this software-- but I'd need help. Maybe at the
>very least h2o could work to define some standards, and then demand them
>from ThirdVoice and other potential vendors.
>
>Jon Garfunkel
>Software Engineer
>GTE Internetworking
>
>

Wendy Seltzer, Harvard Law School, (914) 834-3869    
wendy@seltzer.com || wseltzer@law.harvard.edu 
http://wendy.seltzer.org/ [&] http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html
Annotation Engine: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/annotate/main.cgi