For example, if I were reading something by Plato, I might want to see translation notes, commentaries from Augustus, class notes from a professor, notes from a modern scholar relevant to my own paper, and my own comments.
This looks more like a task for lots of hyperlinks, and it looks like it would be beyond Plucker's capabilities.
We may be imagining slightly different commentaries.
Many printed bibles (or literature textbooks) are full of tiny little explanations that are sort of like footnotes.
The best laid plans o' mice and men gang oft agley.
The whole thing could be marked as "quotation from from Robert Burn's 'Ode to a Field Mouse'", but you might still want to mark up the "agley" for vocabulary.
Similarly, a Marlowe's Faustus text might want to indicate which sections were missing from/changed depending on the
folio, and still give commentary on smaller subsections
within the insertions.
While I think it is clear that people would use a simple annotation facility for making marginal notes, I am not sure that something as sophisticated as you envision would have many users. For instance, it would take a lot of effort to prepare a text that does this. Standard HTML etexts downloaded from the web won't support anything this sophisticated. Neither do the Intelex PastMasters texts that I use on my desktop and laptop (and have some in Plucker format on my PDA, with Intelex's special permission).
Unless there is a user base and people interested in writing parsers to convert texts for something like this, I am not really interested in implementing it. Actually, I don't have time to implement anything this sophisticated even if there is a user base. The details of implementation, too, would depend on the needs of the particular user community. When and if someone wants to produce texts with these sorts of features, we can increase the header size and come up with a key-string system. I am personally sceptical of whether this is going to happen. I don't have a system this sophisticated on my desktop, actually.
The one specific application I can easily envision would be Bible commentaries. But these can be handled via standard HTML hyperlinks (see the ccel.org stuff) or via specialized Bible-reading software which allows you to view two texts side-by-side, say commentary and text.
Currently, I am just imagining that there are many people who, as they read, want to be able to make little marginal notes, but can't. This is an advantage that paper books (assuming one owns them and can afford to write in them) have.
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