Guidelines for making annotations

Your Full Name:

URL of your personal page (optional):

A URL entered here, will be used to create a link from the author's name entered above to the page referenced by your URL. Please only use this for real personal pages. Links to other pages can best be entered elsewhere (see further). But if you do have a home page, please fill in its URL: if other people are interested by what you write in your annotation, this is the simplest way for them to get more information about you.

Your email address:

Filling in an email address is only useful if you did not enter the URL of your home page (which normally already contains your email and other coordinates). But if you don't have a home page, this is the only way others may get in touch with you.

Your (self-chosen) Password:
(optional, in case you want to make sure only you will be able to later edit your annotation, when editing will be implemented)

Annotated node (optional). :

This field is normally already filled in by default with the filename for the node you are annotating. The filename is the last part of the URL without the ".html" suffix. If you leave this blank, your comment will be interpreted as a general comment, to be added to the list of all annotations.

Choose type of annotation: Comment Refutation Confirmation Correction Illustration

This is rather obvious. The annotation types at present don't have any special meaning for the system. They are just used to describe the annotation in the list of all annotations. In a later stage we might possibly start to interpret these as a kind of semantic link types, but don't worry too much about it now. The easiest is just to leave the default "Comment" option on.

Title of annotation:

Please choose a short and informative title for what you want to express. If this is left blank, the new document will just be titled "Annotation", but that seems a little bit stupid. If you don't really want to write a comment, but just want to add a link, you can leave the following text field blank and directly write the HTML code for the link in the title field, e.g.

Check <a href=URL> this link </a>

Text of annotation (optional):

Here we come to the heart of the matter, where you can fill in your comment or reflections. You are advised not to directly type the text into the form field, but rather write it in your favorite word processor or HTML editor. When you are completely satisfied with the text, you can then paste it into the form field. (If you use a WYSIWYG HTML editor, make sure that the text you copy and paste is the HTML source code, not just the WYSIWYG text as it would be seen in your browser). That way you will be better capable to produce a good formatting, spell checking, etc. Remember that annotations immediately become visible to everybody, and that there is no easy way to correct mistakes.

As you could guess, texts in HTML will look much better on the screen, and be able to incorporate links or even images, once the annotation is submitted. ASCII text is OK, but may be less pleasant to look at. If you are using plain text, please enter one carriage return at the end of each line, and two carriage returns to separate paragraphs.

You can also leave the text field empty, in which case only the title of your annotation will be added to the annotation list and no new document will be created. This is useful if your comment is only one line long, or if you just wish to add a link to another document (see above). You may also use this if you want to create a really long and elaborate annotation document with your own formatting that is kept on your own server. In that case, you just need to announce the new document via a link in the title field, and leave the text field empty.