Just raising this since people might not know about it, but this is a Web standard now https://www.w3.org/annotation/. There are a couple of companies which have created browser plugins for this.
It's not a bad idea, it's a good first step, but they're proposing that any group or private person can host an annotation service.
This will cause first of all competition, because which service has the most annotations? Using my annotation service hosted on my minecraft server might be useless because it only has my own annotations.
So obviously users will want to use a larger service, and here comes all the standard issues of a user-driven internet, trust, donations, groups forming and such. Also you might end up in a bubble, seeing annotations only from one particular side of the political spectrum.
Of course this model does not have the same issues as the fediverse where annotation services can de-federate from each other, the user is free to pick and choose whichever they want. There might even be a helpful counter in the UI that shows how many annotations a particular service has for this website.
The only real solution to all this is some sort of global database, like IPFS perhaps, where we can store the annotations. And then we can all individually host gateway servers to this database that the end user connects through.
But that has its own problems of course, you can't just magically make a distributed database without heavy bandwidth consumption and its own hosting requirements.
1. https://www.w3.org/annotation/diagrams/annotation-architectu...
What I really want is no site to win; true success doesn't come from centralized solutions. Each user should have their own annotation feed!
What I'd love to see is something like the return of blogrolls, an annotater's list of people they follow. Users promoting users. A good extension could let us do a N-degrees exploration, let us see comments of people we follow, people they follow, people those people follow... Expanding the network & implicitly suggesting to us other people we might want to follow.
I personally really really loved the social aspect of del.icio.us. Finding other people who were searching deep for interesting content was something I spent time on & it rewarded me handsomely, back in the day. I hope for similar thing here we're not just using this to have annotations, we're also using it as a content discovery tool, seeing what content there is from people we follow.
I'd try to suggest sites should have something like pingbacks, to make it so the site can keep track of annotations. But that would let them filter anotations which I don't like, and more problematically, it's an opt in mechanism. Having centralized search systems seems obvious. Ideally maybe some kind of kademlia hash might offer a P2p alternative. It's quite possible maybe bittorrent pex's P2p layer could be used/abused for this.
The Web annotations protocol has been published as W3C spec in 2016 already (so not "now"), and, as a child of its time, uses god-awful JSON-LD, just like previous W3C specs chased XML whether it was a good fit or not when exchange of text data is one of the actual use cases for markup languages.
Is there an English word for always getting it wrong and blindly promoting formats? In German, there's the term Schlaglochsuchmaschine (pot hole search engine) as a metaphor borrowed from the automotive domain.
I'm using am example from your website to try and convert from ofx to xml.
"content must start with document element when document type isn't specified" is the error I get.
Many thanks!!