Original Annotation API Proposal

Original API Proposal

(Per discussion with Ian Bicking and Joshua Gay).

A proposal for an Atom representation of an annotation based on the Atom syndication standard.

Here's an example from that document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  
  <title>Example Feed</title> 
  <link href="http://example.org/"/>
  <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
  <author> 
    <name>John Doe</name>
  </author> 
  <id>urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b93C-0003939e0af6</id>
  
  <entry>
    <title>Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok</title>
    <link href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03"/>
    <id>urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a</id>
    <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
    <summary>Some text.</summary>
  </entry>
  
</feed>

An annotation is a single Atom entry:

<entry
  xmlns:ann="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Annotation">
  <title></title>
  <link href="{document being commented on}" />
  <id>urn:uuid:blahblahblah</id> 
  <updated>YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:DD</updated>
  <source>{uri}</source>
  <content type="html">
    Delete this term
  </content>
  <category term="copyedit" scheme="http://laptop.org" />
  <category term="{tag}" scheme="?" />
  <ann:selected-text>Some text that was highlighted</ann:selected-text>
  <ann:pointer>/html[1]/body[1]/div[2]</ann:pointer> 
  <author>
    <uri>{open ID URI}</uri>
  </author>
</entry>

Entries can be posted with the Atom Publishing Protocol another IETF standard.

This is based on a APP Collection. This is some base URI, e.g.,:

 http://localhost/APP/

You POST to this URI with this entry as the content body. The server will respond with a Location header that indicates where the entry has been placed. This value will be put into the <source> tag, indicating where the entry is now stored. Later updates to the comment are done by PUTting to this URI, with the new entry. Removing the comment is done by DELETE'ing the URI.

When you do GET /APP/ you will get an Atom feed. This is basically a set of entries enclosed in a <feed> element.

When you load a page, you would load any comment feeds in which you have indicated interest. This would happen asynchronously -- locally-hosted or cached comments will come up quickly, but potentially other comments would come up more slowly. This also involves fetching data from other domains, which is currently barred in Javascript with XMLHttpRequest; we'll have to create an exception to the permissions.

Threading Comments

Annotations can have comments; effectively annotations on the annotation. This can be done using the in-reply-to extension. Lets say you leave a comment on the previous example entry, you'd have:

 <entry
  xmlns:ann="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Annotation"
  xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0">
  <title></title>
  <link href="{source uri from other entry; or to original document?}" />
  <id>urn:uuid:04f9820d03</id> 
  <thr:in-reply-to ref="urn:uuid:blahblahblah"
   href="{source uri from other entry}"
   type="application/atom+xml" />
  <updated>YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:DD</updated>
  <content type="html">
    This annotation is dumb.
  </content>
  <author>
    <uri>{open ID URI}</uri>
  </author>
</entry>

Redundancy and Threading

If an annotation is attached to another annotation that isn't available (maybe it hasn't been uploaded, maybe it's been deleted, maybe it's private, etc), then the tree-like threading of the comments starts to fall apart. To make this more reparable, some redundant information will be included in the Atom entry. A link to the most-parent document will be retained through all entries. In the case of an annotation that is attached to a specific piece of text, that text will also be copied. Then the UI may place the orphaned comment someplace appropriate. The orphaned comment should still look lost -- it's not in its proper context, and ideally it would be moved or deleted or edited to make it more appropriate.

hAtom

hAtom is a Microformat for putting Atom entries in HTML. We may way to represent the inline comments using this, mostly to provide a satisfying sense of symmetry in what is displayed, serialized, and created by the annotation process. But not all kinds of annotations will fit into this.

Pointers

While annotations can be made on pages (URLs), they can also be made on parts of a page. There will be a variety of ways of indicating the point at which the comment applies.

For PDF documents, a combination of page and coordinates can be used. For HTML an XPath document can be used. For images in HTML an XPath plus coordinates could be used. The format can be extended if there are other useful ways of indicating positions -- for example, a link between two locations.