annotation software for docbook

[Jean-Marc Roth <jmroth@mpi-sb.mpg.de>]

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Hi,
I'm trying not to be annoying ;-) but I really need feedback on this,
posted a while ago.
We don't want to develop something the community disagrees with.
Please take a second of your time to read this, and feel free to get
back to me whenever you like...
Thanks,
- -jm


Hello,

we're currently developing an annotation system for the Web.

Guess what: we've based it on the DocBook DTD.



My question would be what the community expects:

A system which,

1. once a book is in it's final stage, lets user annotate some specific
elements,

2. lets users annotate a document all the time, even during its creation.



The problem for #2 would be that I need to reference each paragraph in a
1to1 relationship with my annotations, e.g. paragraphs and chapters can
be added without anything getting out of sync. Obviously, this would
make it much more complicated than #1, which would loose all annotations
once there's a new version of the book released.

As far as #1 is concerned, the solution would probably be to add anchors
to the finished book after specific items, like </para> etc., and
referencing those anchors using the chunk name with an incrementing id
for the para-tags. However this would be much less flexible!

For #2 I could create a preprocessor populating all the tags I want with
"id" parameters, converting it to a new XML document, the user should
use from that moment (hence establishing the 1-1 relationship). However,
the possibility arises that the user creates id tags by himself, or
wants to modify some afterwards. Could I simply not allow this?  
Furthermore, I'm not allowed to create new parameters on the fly, since
modifying the DTD is not allowed in this case, is it? (I could create my
own idx parameter or whatever...)



I hope you could follow and I would be thankful for any remarks on this
subject.



Best regards,



- --
Jean-Marc Roth




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