Annotation

[jackycute]

Let user to annotate some parts of the text or paragraph to comment and discuss.
Like google doc dose.
Need to do more research on this.

[smdowl]

love this

[rdbartlett]

👍

I love hackmd and the one feature that prevents me from completely switching away from Google Docs is just the ability for people to leave comments on specific lines of the doc.

Perhaps it would be easier to copy Github's inline comments, rather than the Google Docs approach?

[jackycute]

Hi @rdbartlett,
I would prefer using the inline comment instead of issue based comments, too.
Thanks for supporting us 😄

[rufuspollock]

@jackycute love hackmd. This would be a fantastic feature to add. Have you had any further thoughts on this?

[jackycute]

Thanks @rufuspollock !
I just take a look at gitbook and I think be able to add comments to a paragraph is enough for most use case.

So there are ways to do annotation:

1. add in the code like a git review
2. add in the paragraph of output html

But in both situation we still need to consider about what if the content changed?
Drop the comment directly? or Keep it there?

Open for discussion here.

[SISheogorath]

In case of git you are not using the whole text. You only use the diff which has line number where you add the comment. When the diff changes the comments are dropt.

In case of HackMD you have always the whole text (correct me if I'm wrong) so in this case doing a change anywhere it would kill the whole comments which is not what we want. In case we change formatting we have to up count the line number to get the comments always in right place which doesn't scale.

So right now I'm not sure how we should be able to manage that in a scaleable way :/ Already thought about that many times for my blog but never came to a useful solution.

Maybe we can use something nearly similar to a diff. Diffs hold Line numbers and content in their data. So in case the linenumber changes you can find the point using the previous and the following lines. We can store the same information but instead of storing the code replacement we attach a comment to this.

I'm not sure if there is any library implementing this for NodeJS but in my eyes it's the way we have to go.

[jackycute]

Good point @SISheogorath

Actually we've done the authorship annotation (I think you know it).
The code is here: https://github.com/hackmdio/hackmd/blob/master/lib/models/note.js#L328

We could do a similar things like mark a text as anchor of the comment and the comment will moving with the text changes.
So if anyone delete the range of the anchor text, the comment will follow with the rest text which have more length or go up if doc isn't that long anymore.

[almereyda]

Instead of implementing an inline real-time annotation and conversation layer, one can already build on the Open Annotation Standard and the @hypothesis ecosystem and restrict such a feature to distinct releases, hence versions of a document. I can already download them, why not also render as HTML, too? Each receive specific commit URLs and can as such be differentiated.
This could nicely integrate with the mechanics presented in #114 (comment)

Linking to an existing annotation ecosystem also opens up to additional user bases.

[taw00]

This one thing stopped our team dead in their tracks from using HackMD. So... this RFE gets my enthusiastic vote as well.

[jackycute]

Just found http://annotatorjs.org/

[rufuspollock]

@jackycute 😄 - that's something I and colleagues at Open Knowledge helped create - it is now maintained by hypothes.is folks. I should have mentioned it earlier. I also should mention http://okfnlabs.org/textus/ - it had some neat ideas but is probably not hugely relevant here (the annotation stuff there was mainly for docs that were very stable - like academic texts or books).

Also if you haven't seen it i would recommend taking a look at https://github.com/substance - @michael may have some really good experience on the hows and whys of doing comments on text docs like this.