Re: Feedback on Annotations draft.

Hi Ernesto,

here is some brief feedback regarding your annotations proposal on the
wiki. I'll add them there after the discussion on the ML.

First of all, I would recommend against putting revision information
in the annotations. If you manage to get basic annotations working you
deserve a place in AbiWord's SoC hall of fame anyways. Also have you
ever worked with a heavily revised document in MsWord? The "bubbles"
approach used just doesn't scale good enough. (For revisions I'd
recommend a vertical split view, but that's another thing ...)

Secondly I think conceptually two approaches to annotations can be
distinguished:
+ Annotations to "insertion points" (arbitrary locations in the
document, like footnotes)
+ Annotations to "objects" (sections, headlines, paragraphs, images ...)

I think the "annotations to objects" approach is preferrable, because
it adheres more to the document structure and allows for better
rendering. What is meant by that?

Imagine a snippet of text that contains 3 annotations. The annotation
rendering code would have to figure out how to smartly place the
"bubbles" displaying them, because they are unrelated to each other.

On the other hand, if you attach annotations to the paragraph they are
contained in, it should be rather straight forward to render a single
bubble that contains all 3 annotations. For finer granularity, e.g. to
make it clear which span belongs to a particular annotation the span
in question can be highlighted when clicked or hovered.

A ridiculously simple mockup for illustration:
http://abisource.com/~robsta/mockups/annotations.png

The mockup also shows an inline view that displays annotation below
their associated objects, similar to a blockquote, which might be
preferrable for printing. Additional decorations can of course be
added to make clear it's an annotation. (If the bubble/inline view
mode for annotations could be switched on a per-object basis then
inline annotations could also be used to add captions to images,
tables ...)

- Rob
Received on Tue Jun 5 10:12:08 2007