Think of Medium's Top Highlight feature, Genius' lyrics annotations, or even Kindle's Popular Highlights.
Annotations are something I think a community could embrace so we all can take a deeper look at meaningful phrases and parts of a post together.
What does the Forem community think?
Want to try it out?
Let's "polyfill" the experience:
You can annotate any website (can be here or dev.to) by using an open-source product known as Hypothes.is.
Also, for the technical aspects there's a W3C standard for web annotations too.
Hmm...🤔 come to think of it we are already onboard with annotations since writing comments on posts is annotating! Well except that it's not with a highlight, but on a whole post. Quote replies qualify too.. (Ah now I'm rambling)
Cheers 🍻!
Latest comments (4)
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I'm definitely in favor of annotations!
I think they should be comments, as you mentioned we already have those.
I think an extra field or two noting that the comment is an annotation, and then plucking that in the design.
.... So we don't have to do multiple queries, I'd say render all the comments as normal, and then asynchronously apply the various annotations as extra (with the comment still showing up below)
We'd need to have really solid logic for finding the annotation and detecting if there's maybe a small edit by the author and whether it's still "good enough".
@pp what do you think about design?
Yes this is actually one of the big challenges for web annotations, to achieve stable anchoring on mutating content. Fuzzy matching is practical and works well enough from what I've seen.
I'm all in for annotations, but I'm just not sure if I understand it well-enough to design anything just yet... Some wireframes of the idea would be very useful here.