Somebody's working on that, too.
Pinpointing is possible, if we accept the idea of using a copy of a page
rather than the original, as with the Annotation
Master. This is what PurpleSlurple
offers. I haven't found many examples of slurpled pages, and it didn't seem to
work for me as I might have wanted (though I admit that I didn't give it much
time), but the idea is rather straightforward, and a good one:
PurpleSlurple is a transcoding service that reformats Web pages on-the-fly to create granular addressability in document elements on EXISTING Web pages.
There does, however, seem to be a problem, though perhaps it's only a problem
of expectations. Though this tool gives us "granular addressability"
(I'd rather call it something like "chapter and verse accuracy", but
I'm not a technical person), at present that's apparently all it does. In other
words, I want that "addressability" not only in order to tell someone
"look at paragraph 14" and not have to have him or her count down 14
paragraphs to find the desired spot on the page, but in order to be able to link
a comment specifically to that spot in the text, and that part apparently hasn't
yet been designed. I'm waiting.
I suppose that I should stop waiting for Marge
- the Interactive Marginalia Processor to become a useful tool. The developer
of this tool lets us know that:
The basic idea of Marge is to make web pages annotatable
- that is, to let readers stick anonymous little notes in the margin of a page
with their comments, corrections etc. which will then be displayed alongside
the page. This is meant to provide a nice and simple way of getting discussion
and feedback going, and just to make pages a bit more interesting and less static.
And since the notes themselves can be annotated, you've got yourself a simple
threaded forum as well.
And there are people who are working on something called Annozilla
- obviously a tool that allows text-specific annotation - as well. I have to admit,
however, that even though I find the development of these tools fascinating, I'm
not enough into this stuff to try a tool like this myself until it gets to a more
stablized version.
The good news, however, is that all this points to the fact that there are people
out there who like the margins metaphor, and have, more or less, the technical
know-how to implement it. The report on Marge, however, is from July 2002, and
it's my guess that the developer has long since abandoned this project for something
else. Maybe someday somebody will pick up where he left off.
Go to: Yes, but how?, or
Go to: In the margins of cyberspace.