<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Gordon Brander</span> in "Slouching toward Xanadu: a roundup of block reference mechanisms https://t.co/CxSm0bZjHu" (<time class='dt-published'>02/24/2022 17:12:12</time>)</cite></small>
Discussion of some prior art leading up to Google's text fragment links.
This is rather slick. It would be interesting to parse the root URL and show more context of the original author's name, avatar, etc. as well.
If I’m in a meeting, I should be able to share a link in the chat to a particular post on my blog, then select the paragraph I’m talking about and have it highlighted for everyone. Well, now I can.
And you could go a few feet farther if you added fragment support to the site, then the browser would also autoscroll to that part. Then you could add a confetti cannon to the system and have the page rain down confetti when more than three people have highlighted the same section!
Transclusion would make this whole scenario quite different. Let's imagine this again...
Many in the IndieWeb have already prototyped this using some open web standards. It's embodied in the idea of media fragments and fragmentions, a portmanteau of the words fragment and Webmention.
A great example can be found at https://www.kartikprabhu.com/articles/marginalia
This reminds me that I need to kick my own server to fix the functionality on my main site and potentially add it to a few others.
What am I missing about annotations for the web?
They're not as wide spread certainly, but several people within the IndieWeb have been experimenting with annotations, and Webmention in conjunction with text fragments called fragmentions. In particular, Kartik Prabhu probably has one of the best examples and his site is able to take webmentions to fragments and show them in the margins in his site (much like Medium does).
Chain: perhaps the simplest collaborative blogging form; a straightforward back and forth exchange of posts exploring a particular topicMesh: like a chain, but with multiple participants; still a legible structure e.g. alternating / round-robin style, but with more possibilities for multiplicity of perspectives and connections across postsFractal: multiple participants and multi-threaded conversation; more infinite game branching; a possibly ever-evolving and mutating conversation, so could probably use some kind of defined endpoint, maybe time-bound
In the time I've been using Webmentions, I've seen all of these sorts of structures using them. Of particular interest, I've seen some interesting experiments with Fragmentions that allow one to highlight and respond to even the smallest fragments of someone's website.
and started testing the functionality on HTML pages last year
According to Kevin Marks, this is the GitHub Repo they've been using for creating this work: https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment#:~:text=the%20worst&text=a%20Google&text=serious%20breakage&text=behavior
Clicking the snippet still takes you to the webpage that it pulled the information from, but now the text from the snippet will be highlighted in yellow, and the browser will automatically scroll down to the section in question.
This is a feature that's been implemented in most browsers for a while as fragmentions.
Hypothes.is has supported this sort of functionality for a few years now as well.
I'm curious how these different implementations differ?
Web annotation seems to promote more critical thinking and collaboration but it’s doubtful that it would ever fully replace commenting systems.
But why not mix them together the way the IndieWeb has done?! A few people are using the new W3C recommendation spec for Webmention along with fragmentions to send a version of comments/marginalia/annotations to sites that accept them and have the ability to display them!
A good example of this is Kartik Prabhu's website which does this somewhat like Medium does. One can write their response to a sub-section of his post on their own website, and using Webmention (yes, there's a WordPress plugin for that: https://wordpress.org/plugins/webmention/ ) send him the response. It then shows up on his site as a quote bubble next to the appropriate section which can then be opened and viewed by future readers. Example: https://kartikprabhu.com/articles/marginalia For those interested, he's opensourced the code to help accomplish this: https://github.com/kartikprabhu/marginalia
While annotation systems have the ability to overlay one's site, there's certainly room for serious abuse as a result. (See an example at https://indieweb.org/annotation#Criticism) It would be nice if annotation systems were required to use something like webmentions (or older trackback/pingbacks) to indicate that a site had been mentioned elsewhere, this way, even if the publisher wasn't responsible for the resulting comments, they would be aware of possible attacks on their work/site/page.
I try to follow the tenets of the Indie Web movement in owning all of my own data and in publishing on my own site and syndicating elsewhere (POSSE
Compare this with the fragmention: http://boffosocko.com/about/website-philosophy-structure/#I+try+to+follow