What's next?!

[Benjamin Young <by...@bigbluehat.com>]

Hi all!

Randall and I had a great opportunity to meet-up in DC for the http://iannotate.org/ conference last month. While there we shared our visions for the project, chatted with other interested contributors/collaborators (folks from http://hypothes.is/ and others), and came away with some ideas for where we might head.

However, we can't get there alone--both because it's too much to do and goes against the whole "community over code" thing here at the ASF. ;)

Randall has a series of plans pertaining to the overall API design, his dom-* libraries, etc. I'll let him follow this up with more on that front.

We also decided that for this community to grow, we'll need something more "out of the box" than just a set of anchoring libraries. Mainly, too few people realize they have complex anchoring needs until they've already gotten pretty far down the road on building their own annotator (or forking a more "complete" one like ye olde Annotator.js). Consequently, we thought providing a minimal higlighter (like the one in the demo) would go a long way toward increasing interest and eventually contribution.

The current demo lacks some key "hard to do" thing like cross-DOM node boundaries:
https://annotator.apache.org/demo/#selector(type=TextQuoteSelector,exact=annotate)

However, it's a place to start, and it's my hope that if we begin working on/toward that goal (while building on top of Randall's anchoring libraries, and more Web Annotation JSON processing bits), we'll be able to provide the world with the library folks have actually hoped for--while still keeping things modular enough for those out there building Voltron.

If you're here and have opinions (differing or otherwise), we'd love to hear them!

Community over code. :)

Cheers,
Benjamin

--

http://bigbluehat.com/

http://linkedin.com/in/benjaminyoung