Treora commented on issue #60:
URL:
https://github.com/apache/incubator-annotator/issues/60#issuecomment-722659798
We shortly discussed this topic in today’s call while looking over the open
issues. We agreed that just parsing the syntax is not much use, as it comes
together with a specific algorithm for finding the target text, which differs
from the Web Annotation model.
A quick overview of things we could provide:
- anchoring of a fragment directive: I implemented the essence of this
already (see above comment); we could provide a function that simply wraps my
implementation. (we even discussed the option of importing my whole
implementation into this repo, though to me it feels cleaner to keep these as
separate projects)
- describing a selection (a Range or perhaps a list of Ranges) as a fragment
directive: this would need a custom adaptation of `describeTextQuote`, modified
to ensure that the total quote (including prefix&suffix) ends at word
boundaries (note that at least this is possible now, since a recent [change][]
in the spec). Also, it should use a `textStart,textEnd` pair (again to be cut
at word boundaries) instead of an exact quote when the selection crosses block
elements. And perhaps there are more hurdles.
- convert fragment directive ⇒ Selector: If the document is available, we
could simply anchor it and describe it in the other format. Without the
document at hand, we could also convert it, although with a (hopefully small)
risk that the differences in specifications will make it fail to anchor or
(worse) point at something else. I think the conversion could, after syntax
parsing, be done with more or less this simple code:
```
({ prefix, textStart, textEnd, suffix }) => textEnd
? {
type: 'RangeSelector',
start: { type: 'TextQuoteSelector', prefix, exact: textStart },
end: { type: 'TextQuoteSelector', prefix: textEnd, exact: '',
suffix }
}
: { type: 'TextQuoteSelector', prefix, exact: textStart, suffix }
```
(note the little hack of using `prefix: textEnd, exact: ''` because
RangeSelector’s end is exclusive and `textEnd` should nevertheless be included
in the target)
- convert Selector ⇒ fragment directive: the reverse of the above. Again, if
the document is available, we could simply anchor it and describe it in the
other format. But in case the document is not available, conversion in this
direction would only possible if the selector is of the type/shape shown in the
above example code.
I suppose it is mainly a matter of demand and priority whether we’ll
implement any of these. I might actually try tackle some of these points soon,
as I would like to use these features myself.
[change]: https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment/pull/148
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