Subject: Re: Annotation & asynch collaboration
From: [email-masked] (Marc Andreessen)
To: Dan Connolly <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked] (Marc Andreessen), [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 92 21:18:36 -0800

Dan Connolly writes:
> >ANNOTATE /file/to/annotate?/file/of/annotation?Text describing annotation.
> 
> I'd suggest
> 
> APPEND /file/to/annotate
> <a HREF="file/of/annotation">Text describing annotation</a>
> .
> 
> The server could impose limits on the length of the annotation,
> and it should somehow validate the syntax, I suppose.

The point behind *not* doing general appends is that they aren't a
good idea since document integrity is breached (a link is immediately
obvious as just that and will cause little confusion [especially if
clients always prepend a fullname], but if arbitrary text can be added
to a document, you'll never know what's going on).  To be practical, I
know *I'm* not going to run an httpd server that allows anyone to
append any text they want to my documents.

And if general appends aren't going to be allowed (through server
validation of the <A...> syntax or whatever), then why not just let
the server construct the link append itself?

Marc