Hi David, Interesting to see annotations popping-up again, it feels like one of those cyclical things/efforts on the web. On this in particular:
On Thu, Sep 30, 2021 at 10:25 AM David Bokan <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi there! > > A few of us over in Chromium are thinking of how we can enable annotation, > directly in the browser, without need for extensions. Since you brought up "without need for extensions", I'd ask the obvious question: Are there any browser extensions that do it *well*? (my experience to date has been no, for various reasons, which isn't a reason not to do it, however does question that kind of framing, at least as evidence of feasibility) > In a sentence: to enable shared commentary over web content. We're very early > in the stages of thinking about this, there's no prototype or code written > yet but we did gather some thoughts and ideas in an explainer. > https://github.com/bokand/web-annotations/ I took a quick look and there's a lot of good background there! Great start. There's at least 1-2 more examples of distributed web annotation prior art (some semi-active) that I can think of, like https://indieweb.org/marginalia. I can suggest these as pull requests to the explainer if you'd like. > This is something that many folks have considered in the past, Mozilla > included. I know that link is ancient > https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Feature_Brainstorming:Notes_and_Annotations Great find (TIL). Good to see some of that historical thinking :) > but I'm wondering if there's anyone at Mozilla today who's working or > interested in a related space and would like to get involved -- or even just > provide early feedback. I'm at least tangentially interested, more from the perspectives of having seen over the (many years) : 1. Lots of web annotation (including in browser) attempts / services / sites try & fail (often repeating mistakes) 2. The few web annotation services that gain traction eventually turning into yet another harassment vector for the web (pretty much every such attempt designed/built by highly privileged individuals who conceive more of the optimistic possibilities without any real understanding of the threats to safety on the web, again repeating mistakes of every social media site) 3. The overly complex attempt at standardization at W3C, which barely has (some) interop, but at a high enough barrier as to cause more centralization (yet another silo, Hypothesis) than decentralization. 4. Potential for misframing / loss of meaning. When you focus on "web annotation", everything published to the web starts to look like a "web annotation", at which point the phrase or even word "annotation" becomes meaningless. > I think this is functionality that really relies on working across browsers Maybe? I'm not sure about "relies on" (at least for prototyping/incubation), and even in the case of small communities wanting to interact amongst themselves, they're exploring peer-to-peer methods for doing so, that are essentially differently styled web comments. > so would really appreciate getting early perspective and/or involvement from > Firefox. Hopefully the above is helpful. There's also a community of folks actively publishing distributed "annotations" to the web based on fairly simple composable open standards in the IndieWeb community that has done a lot of analysis and documenting of their work: https://indieweb.org/annotation, so you may want to also ask there: https://chat.indieweb.org/dev Thanks, Tantek -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "[email protected]" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/d/msgid/dev-platform/CAEV2_WajcshwUWgRv3f%3DzgfZtt5AFgXRYg%2BhKWgc2fLeQbNPzg%40mail.gmail.com.
