Thanks for the reply!
On Thursday, September 30, 2021 at 2:29:07 PM UTC-4 [email protected]
wrote:
> 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)
This is, of course, subjective -- I've been using hypothes.is for the last
few months and actually used it to decent effect to have a conversation
about my explainer. I find the tool itself -- the UI and usage patterns in
it -- to be quite intuitive and works well for the most part.
The major down side I see is that it requires both parties interested in a
discussion to be using this same tool and to know about it. Because of this
(my assumption) - most of the web feels pretty barren using it. It's also
service-locked -- meaning it's one broad tent for discussion. When I do
finally stumble across a comment, it's usually irrelevant and from some far
flung corner, not someone I know or interesting.
I expect this would be dramatically improved by having this functionality
built-in in the browser which would provide more feedback, discovery,
incentive to annotate. Also allowing smaller ("denser") circles so
commentary is more likely from people the user knows or at least is
interested in.
There are smaller issues with it too -- more technical in nature. e.g.
annotations on feed based sites (Twitter, etc.) don't work at all. These
are things I think that are fixable but not necessarily show-stoppers.
But I'm curious if you or others have thoughts on the existing landscape
and where it's lacking.
> 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.
Ah, yes - I'm somewhat familiar with it from work around
text-fragments/fragmentation. I'll take a closer look. I'd be happy to
merge in any PRs.
> 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.
+1 to all those. In particular #2 is top of mind for us and the biggest
challenge we have to solve / pitfall to avoid.
Also particularly curious if there's any thoughts/advice Re:W3C standard
<https://www.w3.org/annotation/>. I'm weary of trying to reinvent the
wheel. My thinking was there's some useful technology standardized there,
though it tries to be everything to everyone. The approach I was thinking
to take is to find the minimal functionality we'd want to support and
cherry-pick the bits of that standard needed to make it work, build on
those.
> > 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.
For prototyping and running a trial it's maybe not a deal breaker. The
problem is it's the kind of feature where I want to send a link to a friend
to respond to my comments/annotations on a page -- I don't know (and
shouldn't have to) what browser they're using. If it fails and causes
confusion instead, even 1/10 times, it seems like it really kills the
motivation to use it.
> 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
It is, thank you! Will definitely poke around and ask around there.
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