Pan-browser support for annotations and other meta-information on the World Wide Web

The system described supports the creation, presentation, and control of user-created meta-information, which is displayed with the corresponding documents but stored separately from them, and takes advantage of the notion of application-specific stream transducers.

Abstract

This paper describes an innovative approach for groups to create and share commentary about the content of documents accessible via the World Wide Web. In particular, the system described supports the creation, presentation, and control of user-created meta-information, which is displayed with the corresponding documents but stored separately from them. The typical use for this mechanism is to support annotations about documents accessed through browsing clients of the Web. In contrast to other approaches, the system described herein does not depend on changes in, or specializations to, Web browsers or servers. Rather, the system takes advantage of the notion of application-specific stream transducers; most of the functionality of the system is provided by a specialized proxy. We describe design considerations, the system architecture, usage scenarios, our initial implementation, and future work.