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The natural instinct for a person reading printed text is to write in
the margin. This leaves a permanent record of the reader's
impressions. Marginalia, however, only appears in the reader's copy of
the text; no one else has access to that information. An annotation
system connected to a public document, on the other hand, facilitates
the process of both intellectual commentary and public dialogue. This
is one of the apparent benefits of networking information.
The difficulty is in designing a system that lends itself to intuitive
use. As suggested, the reader would normally scrawl something in
a hardcopy margin. On screen, it must be typed. Further it has to be
placed within the bounds of whatever representational system is in use.
And it must be done in a way that doesn't interfere notably with original
text. Current Web technology (HTML v2.0, cgi-bin scripts in Perl and
browsers like Netscape v1.12) doesn't properly provide for the level
of interactivity which would support an effortless notation system.
Rather, more cumbersome work-arounds are necessary, in anticipation of
Java and other environments which support true interactivity.
The system employed for the Proceedings is intended to work within the
existing framework and provide a limited functionality. First, documents
are marked up, either automatically or by hand, with icons indicating
place markers where comments can be added. These are usually at the top
of a page and around text which is anticipated to draw attention.
Upon selecting the icon, the text page is entirely replaced with an
interface which accepts the name of the reader and their comments.
Upon completion, the comment text is stored alongside the document and
an icon indicating the presence of the comment is added to the original
text. Subsequent readers may then choose to read the comment by selecting
the new icon and, if desired, to supplement the comment with their own.
The shortcomings with this system are largely related to the break
in flow which accompanies the addition of a comment. Since the
Web currently functions under a form of batching mode, generating
more or less static pages on demand, the reader cannot directly
interact with the text or its environment.
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Previous: Document Delivery Systems
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