Writable Web Space

Problem

The frustrating thing about Webspace is that it does not allow annotation. The behaviour of overlapping anchors is undefined, and in netscape behaves differently depending on what else is in the markup. This to me is unacceptable.

Solution

What is needed is anchors with IDs

eg:

<A ID ="Username:Date-time" href="http://www.paneris.co.uk/tim.html">SGML</A od = "Username:Date-Time"> and the ability to send an annotation message addressed to an URL giving the start and finish offsets of the annotation anchor.

I can't work the format of this message out at the moment, as my HTML book has been borrowed.

However, it could be done with Mail:

To:http://www.netscape.com/HTML_spec.html From:tim@paneris.co.uk Subject: Offset 123:127 <!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM "html.dtd"> <HTML> <head> <title>Annotation from tim@paneris.co.uk</title>   <LINK rev=made href="mailto:tim@paneris.co.uk"> <head> </head> <body> As a matter of SGML is the only hope for mankind. </body> </HTML> Most of the message could be generated atomatically.

It would require that webpages should have areas marked writable or not. I would like to see the default being writable, however I guess that one would have to have a default of readonly.

Then we come to a matter of how to display multiple links.

I think that a simple colour coded symbol system should work.

To add an anotation

User highlights text with mouse.

Annotate option becomes actionable.

Annotation box appears, giving document offsets and having picked up users mail id. Also a colour pallette, possibly from the document, is displayed. User clicks on a pixel which represents the type of comment that s/he wishes to make. Where

White = Informational
Black = Contracdiction
Dark Red = Angry Contradiction
Dark Blue = Arrogant Contracdiction
Light blue = Airhead approval
Pink = Fluffy Approval

What happens with Green/ yellow etc I dont know yet, perhaps let it evolve.

The Colour Cube allows 16M colours so I don't feel that One would run out that readily. Can there realy be 16M differenet things to say about a selected piece of text? Well perhaps- "the conservative party is the party of low taxation" might get a few comments.

However it seems to me that this would lead to real web surfing, based on another sensory modality.

I have a tech Q for you - If the colors on a PC are describable as a cube of 255,255,255 and a pallette is necessarily 2D what mappings are used from the cube to the pallette? Answers