Re: [h2o-discuss] Re: meta-discussions

["Jon Garfunkel" <garf@look.boston.ma.us>]

J proctor wrote:
>I'm game.  I've never used ThirdVoice (no Netscape plug-in yet, and I
>refuse to install IE for anyone).  What kind of standards, though?  To be
>considered an interactive document, your server must offer feature X?

Most proposed annotations systems have insisted that an "annotation server"
be established which is separate from the document servers. This releases
the document authors from the burden of including anything special in their
documents. [Note]

>That can't be right.  Please elaborate a little more.  And if we "demand"
>anything, what's the penalty for not complying?  Microsoft hasn't complied
>with W3C's HTML standards ever, and Netscape hasn't yet (although they're
>working on it), and both of them seem to be doing just fine.

I detect a slight bias here, but I won't press.

We sometimes discount the hype and forget how good *both* MSIE and NN are in
fact conforming to most of the standards. The fact that people are generally
more aware of the standards deficiencies in these products (any more so than
in most software, hardware, or kitchenware) is testament to the visibility
of the WWW standards.

Harbor your prejudices, but MS and Netscape are, at the very least, on the
record for desiring standards. ThirdVoice, like many, but not all, startups,
pays no heed to proposed standards under the hubris of spreading the fiction
that the idea was nobody else's. But hey, give them some credit for
capitalizing on the non-constructive several years' worth of research of
disparate web-annotation developers.

>Like open source in general, this is a public relations and education
>campaign.  People have to know about and *want* a standard before vendors
>will react and provide it.

I agree. I would hope that all users, especially technical people, demand
interoperability standards compliance as consumers.

The threat to ThirdVoice is that better, more interoperable, software will
be around to replace it.

>I think it's important to remember that simple annotation is *only* an
>intermediate step towards the kind of discussion that we want.

Agreed. Many annotations systems proposes support for threaded discussions.
See [Note].

>There you go.  A spark for a meta-meta-discussion (are notes the best
>thing we can talk about?), and a call for new ideas, preferably with
>examples, about the information architecture (including infrastructure,
>interface design, and any other "i" words you can think of) necessary to
>get the Web caught up, at least, to what we can do with email.

Agreed. As mentioned in my original post, I am trying to bring the resources
of the W3C aboard; the official word is that their Technology & Society
Group is focused on P3P. [w3cAnn]

There are existing casual connections with W3C, not the least of which is
that it's located right down the street at MIT.

>Unfortunately, I don't think there is much of a position, especially in a
>dynamically annotated document, other than "right here".

This is defined by W3C to be XPointer, a Working Draft of the W3C. [XML]
As it is not supported by any browser, most fudge pointer-methods by using a
string-matching method instead, with varying results. (the Perl-parsing
proxy in CritLink especially suffers).

Notes:

[w3cAnn]:
    W3C Annotation/Collaboration projects site, to be updated real soon now:
    http://www.w3.org/Collaboration
    Mailing list archives for www-annotation:
    http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-annotation/
[Note]:
    Further information, reference about existing web-annoation software
systems.
    http://look.boston.ma.us/garf/webdev/annote/software.html
[XML]:
    The W3C XML Pointer Language Working Draft
    http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-xptr-19980303


Jon Garfunkel
Software Engineer
also, web developer
GTE Internetworking
Route 128, Mass.