Annotating citations from other sites

[jphastings]

I'd love to be able to mark up quoted text on my websites so that:

• if someone uses Margin to annotate them on my site, those annotations are recorded as being of the original text (and also shown there)
• annotations of text on that original site (that are wholly reproduced on my site, and appropriately referenced) are also shown on my site.

There's a possibility this could be done with the cite attribute of html blockquote and q tags. Though I can't find a standards-compliant way of declaring the date a quote was pulled from the source site on a q or blockquote element, nor would CSS or XPath selectors be easy to make work cross-site.

Do upvote 👍 if this seems interesting!

---

For example if an origin site at https://example.com/page has:

<p>
  A section with some text that's worthy of annotation in it, and some text that's interesting later too.
</p>

And if a second site had:

<p>
  Some commentary about
  <q cite="https://example.com/page">
    some text that's worthy of annotation
  </q>
  in it
</p>

<blockquote cite="https://example.com/page">
  A section with some text
</blockquote>

<p>
  I could also be precise with
  <q cite="https://example.com/page#:~:text=with,some,that's,worthy">
    some text that's
  </q>
  with text fragments, if the quote is ambiguous.
</p>

Then a Margin annotation of:

• "some text that's worthy of annotation" on the second site would appear on the origin site
• "A section with" on the origin site would also appear in the blockquote on the second site
• "commentary about some" on the second site, because it's partially outside the q tag, would not appear on the origin site.

[scanash00]

Just implemented this, will do a new extension release after chrome and edge approve the latest one

[jphastings]

Wow! Thank you!

[scanash00]

Released!

[jphastings]

Hey @scanash00, I'm likely missing something obvious here, but I'm not seeing this working in my Margin extension (Firefox, v0.3.4 released on Feb 17th). Can I check I understand what you've implemented correctly?

• I have a personal page with <blockquote cite="original-url"> blocks here
• I have at.margin.highlight and at.margin.annotation records for the original site eg. here and here

But:

1. the highlights/annotations don't show on my site
2. using margin to highlighting text within the blockquote on my site creates a record against my site rather than the source

I don't think what I described is working for me; should it with the v0.3.4 that I have running in my browser now?

[scanash00]

@jphastings I'm guessing that with the extension remake with wxt.dev I forgot to add this, i'll work on it