Re: Annotating HTML - another question

["Edgar D' Souza" <edgar -dot- b -dot- dsouza -at- gmail -dot- com>]

On 3/30/06, Walter Campbell <atypicaluser -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> Here's another question about annotating HTML. Are there any tools that
> allow you to annotate content on Web pages similar to what can be done with
> Adobe Acrobat or recent versions of Adobe Reader (for example, highlight
> tools, drawing tools, insert/delete text tools).
>
> A scenario to illustrate the type of annotation I'm talking about: you've
> written copy for a Web site. The copy exists on Web pages on a staging
> server. Marketing wants to review and mark up the content as it appears on
> the staged Web site.

This is probably quite different from your mental picture, but:
How about wikis or CMSs (Content Management Systems) ? Unless you have
some complex formatting or layout in your HTML, one or both of these
should be able to handle it. You can setup user accounts in both types
of software, and allow auditable changes to content - in most cases,
the changes can also be accepted or rolled back...
The good part is that the content stays in HTML, and most decent
wikis/CMSs give you a "rich-text" editor with a formatting toolbar
right in your browser. The bad part is that if you were looking for
nice yellow popup comment boxes with the author's name in them, you're
probably not going to get them :-) ("Probably" because just making a
list of the names of such software projects / packages available on
the Net will take quite some time, leave alone making a feature list
of each!)

If you have a spare computer to fool around with, you could set up
Linux with Apache, MySQL and PHP ("LAMP") and download one or more
wiki or CMS projects from sourceforge.net, set them up on that system
and play with them. Maybe even put up a few sample 'content' pages and
ask Marketing whether they're comfortable doing content reviews in
this way?

BTW, Apache, MySQL and PHP also run on Windows, so if you don't like
the "Linux" part of it by all means look at the Windows equivalents.
Linux just happens to be one of my hobby horses ;-)

HTH,
Ed.
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