Welcome to the CritLink Mediator!

You just came from a page that was presented through the CritLink Mediator, which shows you Web documents with some extra link information added. The most visible difference is the mediator's banner at the top of the page. The text field in the banner holds the URL of the page being viewed; you can type in a new URL there and select "Go!" to proceed to a new location. When you select a link in a mediated page, the new page will also be mediated.

The bottom of a mediated page will display some information about how the document is linked. In particular, it shows "backward links" from the page you are viewing; that is, it lists known documents which contain links to the current document. For each link, you are shown the title of the document from which it originates, as well as the particular phrase in the originating document containing the link.

Reading annotated text

As you read a mediated page, you may see [text like this[ between special markers. These markers indicate that someone has made an annotation on that particular phrase of text, which you can view by selecting either of the two markers. It is important to realize that the author of the annotation did not need to modify the document you were reading to allow others to make annotations. That is the magic of the CritLink Mediator!

If your browser supports the "title" attribute, which is part of standard HTML, then you will see the annotator's name and the title of the annotation when you are positioned over an annotation marker. You may also see a [keyword] in square brackets which indicates the role of the annotation as it relates to the annotated document. If your browser does not support this attribute, enabling JavaScript will make this information appear in the status bar of your browser.

Making annotations on text

To make your own annotations, you can select the "comment" button in the mediator's banner. This brings up a form where you can enter your comment. You specify the phrase to annotate by copying and pasting the phrase into the form. For more details about creating annotations this way, try the "comment" button and then select "help" in the annotation window.

The "comment" button is a convenience, but it is not the only way to annotate. Any web document can annotate any other document. So if you have a web site where you can place your own documents, you can publish annotations yourself. Once someone views your annotation document through the mediator, your links will be recorded so that your annotation will appear in the list of backward links at the end of the target document.

To annotate a specific phrase, you need to use a little bit of special syntax. Simply take the URL of the target document and append a hash mark followed by a single quote and the sequence of words in the target. The words should be joined with hyphens and the target phrase should be pointed out with parentheses. (Any space or punctuation, except for an apostrophe, is considered a word break for these purposes.) Let's say, for example, that you wanted to annotate the word "specific" at the beginning of this paragraph. You could append #'annotate-a-(specific)-phrase to the URL of this page and use that as the address in your hyperlink to tell the mediator to reference just that word. The words outside of the parentheses are not part of the target, but they help to locate the target in case it occurs several times in the document.

For other questions about this project and its software, please see the list of Frequently-Asked Questions.


by Ka-Ping Yee, 28 October 1997, with thanks to Norm Hardy