Re: Feedback on Annotations draft.

Hi Martin,

My thoughts, for what they are worth.

Martin Sevior wrote:
> Possibilities for displaying a comment are:
>
> 1. Box in the margin with the comment.

If there are more than few and/or the comments are not very brief, this
would screw the layout beyond recognition. I am not sure this can be
made to work in practice very well (at all).

> 2. A popup that appears during a mouse-over.

I like the pop up for on-screen use, but please be aware that mouse-over
events assume a mouse, and hence do not work on devices that have a
touch screen. It needs to be possible to pop the annotations by a press
event, and it also needs to be possible to place the caret at a document
position which happens to have annotation using a press, i.e., there
needs to be spatial offset between the annotation mark and the document
position.

> 3. make the text appear inline with a defined format. This should be
> hidable.

I do not particularly like this. In the past, I have often annotated my
documents with inline comments and they severely disrupt the flow of the
original text, often being more trouble than they are worth. At the same
time, this would be relatively simple (it's like text which has hidden
markup), and it would work printing-wise.

There is also the option to have the annotation comments in a separate
container, either at the bottom of each page like footnotes, or at the
end of the document like endnotes. For printing, I think I would prefer
this to both the margin and inline options.

Tomas
Received on Tue Jun 5 13:28:50 2007