Re: Suggestions for library.gnome.org features

[Brent Smith <gnome nextreality net>]

Goran Rakic wrote:
> Hi,

Hello!

[snip]
> I think that user annotations are a must, and based on first comments,
> users will like the idea. Annotations can be anchored to paragraph,
> image, list item or a table, function or constant definition in API
> references and can contain text, lists, links and remotely-hosted
> images...

I agree with you 100% here.   We need to find a way to let our users
share information with each other, and annotations are an excellent way
to do that.  I remember always looking at the PHP documentation, and I
always loved the fact that there were user contributed comments at the
bottom of a particular function's page.  Having comments inline would be
even more awesome and even allows us to gain some insight into how our
APIs/applications are being used.

[snip]
> offending or inaccurate annotations. Remember, annotations will not be
> displayed on default, and user must subscribe to some other user's
> annotations to view them so there should not be many deletions to do.

Can there be some mode where we can view all annotations?

[snip]
> What I am unsure is if there is a need for grouping subscriptions, with
> group editing support. This will be out of plan for first release, but
> there would be nice if I can include initial support in underlying code
> as soon as possible. Then, users will be able to create an
> InsertYourDistroHere group, or group for specific locales and join their
> annotations together, making easy for other users to see relevant
> annotations.

That would definitely be a cool feature, perhaps annotations can support
tags and we could aggregate annotations based on a collection of tags?
(thinking Administration, Usability, Ubuntu, etc.  as examples of tags)

[snip]
> The other solution for this problem is to implement annotations tagging,
> with "tag masters", coordinators that can approve/deny inclusion of
> specific tag to annotation. It is better as one annotation can have both
> language and category(ies) tag(s), and other users can subscribe only to
> specific tags on specific language(s). Languages list also can be loaded
> from browser preferences, as a default value, but as annotation manager
> is server side script, it can have additional customization for
> overriding browser settings.
[snip]

Oops, guess I should have read further before replying.

Thanks for all your work on this, I very much look forward to this
finished product.  If you need guidance or advice/help, please let me
know.

Best Regards,

--
Brent Smith <gnome nextreality net>
IRC: smitten