Marginalia Change Log

This change log includes changes to the stand-alone version of Marginalia, the OJS plugin, and the Moodle annotation implementation. The combined format simplifies my job of keeping the log up-to-date, and reduces the change for error. Note that most bug fixes etc. from the stand-alone version apply to the subsequent Moodle and OJS version release; similarly, some fixes to the stand-alone version first appear in a Moodle or OJS release.

Release Notes for 2007-01-24 (OJS version)

This is the first public release of the OJS plug-in.

• Click-to-link feature: links can be created to individual pargraphs in other OJS articles on the same site by clicking on the desired paragraph a browser window.
• Experimental drop-down switches modes between the standard mode, which fetches all annotations by the current user for this article, and a per-paragraph public view mode. In the latter mode, no annotations are initially shown. When the user clicks a paragraph, all public annotations for that paragraph (by all users) are loaded.

Release Notes for 2007-01-21 (standalone version)

This version is a port of many of the features of the current OJS release.

• Ranges now include full begin and end information, necessary for determining highlight overlap and whether a given document location is within a given annotation
• Some modifications to allow annotations to be fetched on a per-paragraph basis (full implementation in OJS version)
• Cleaned-up code for the PHP sample back-end.

Release Notes for 2006-09-24 (OJS version)

• First prototype release for OJS
• Rewrite of ranges to optimize Marginalia for long documents. This will break any existing annotations in the database.
• Support for annotations with links to other documents, both external and within OJS
• Keywording feature allows notes to be created from drop-down list or as free-form text

Release Notes for 2006-06-23 (Moodle version)

IMPORTANT: This release fixes a significant security vulnerability. All users should upgrade.

Release Notes for 2006-06-08 (Moodle version)

• Remember the user whose annotations are displayed, rather than always resetting to the current user.
• Smartcopy can now be toggled by pressing Shift-Ctrl-S
• Guest users are not permitted to annotate
• An assortment of small fixes (especially for IE)
• Add Smartcopy instructions to summary page; minor display changes

Release Notes for 2006-05-12 (stand-alone version)

• Firefox and IE were handling nonbreaking spaces differently. This has been remedied. Both browsers now treat nbsp as a space character. In addition, both browsers would reduce multiple whitespace characters in annotated content to a single space. They no longer do this (although both browsers have some odd built-in behavior in this regard).
• IE could not handle an annotation highlight region beginning at the very start of a post. This is fixed.
• Updated to the current hAtom specification. This may break existing applications as class names have changed, and the link to an individual post on a page is now found using rel="bookmark" rather than the class attribute.

Release Notes for 2006-02-24 (Moodle version)

• Integrated with the Moodle 1.6 code base (version as of today). I don't plan to continue supporting Moodle 1.5.x.
• Fixed the Atom link on the summary page.
• Adopt current hAtom specification

Release Notes for 2006-02-06 (Moodle and stand-alone)

• Renamed the software to Marginalia; this should make it easier to reference and potentially also easier to find with web searches.

Release Notes for 2006-01-15 (Moodle version)

• Update documentation files, which were slightly out-of-date
• New columns were missing from tables.sql (though not from create-db.php)

Release Notes for 2006-01-07 (Moodle version)

• Allow users to view others' annotations on forum pages, including margin notes and highlighting.
• Add ability to view a summary of all annotations for a course.
• Complete (I hope) localization for summary page.
• Speed up calculations used when annotation highlights are shown.
• Store Moodle object IDs in database, thereby speeding up queries (I was concerned about scalability with large numbers of annotations and LIKE queries on the database). Note: this requires that the object_id and object_type columns columns be added to any existing database. See create-db.php for details.
• Remove buttons for teacher, author annotations, reverting to public/private access

Release Notes for 2005-09-12 (Moodle and stand-alone)

• The fix for forum ratings had introduced an IE bug. This is resolved.
• The size of the delete and sharing buttons are fixed, so that they won't be too small for pages and Moodle themes with small default font sizes.

Release Notes for 2005-08-24 (Moodle version)

Note that the database has changed a bit, although by default the new column isn't required. Logging settings are at the top of annotation/config.js and annotation/lib.php.

• Sharing buttons on the summary page.
• Moodle logging
• Eric Schewe's uninstall script.
• Option to include user names in annotation-related URLs so they will be in the Apache log.
• Option to mark deleted annotations instead of deleting them (useful for logging; requires new database column)

Release Notes for 2005-08-24 (stand-alone)

This fixes a relatively rare bug which can cause Firefox trouble with certain kinds of selection ranges. The bug causes text selections to vanish is soon as they are made; if they don't vanish, creating annotations from them fails.

Release Notes for 2005-08-23 (Moodle version)

• Moodle URLs are stored in the database with the configuration-dependent part stripped. This means there is no need to update the database if the site URL changes.
• The summary page wasn't filtering displaying shared/private annotations correctly: other users' annotations were always shown, even when "my annotations" was selected. Note to the curious: although the interface doesn't allow it, it is possible to view more specific lists of annotations by editing the summary page URL (e.g. you can see only your own private annotations, or the shared annotations of a specific user).

Release Notes for 2005-08-20 (Moodle version)

There was an incompatibility between forum ratings and annotation which is resolved in this release.

Release Notes for 2005-08-19 (Moodle version)

This release fixed a bug in the install procedure and a left-over dependency on mod_rewrite.

Release Notes for 2005-08-16 (Moodle version)

This release focused on the quality of the summary paged code:

• Refactor the summary page to make it easy to add support for other Moodle modules.
• Reintroduce Atom support, this time properly integrated with summary search. I don't think this will actually work for anyone, however, since the feed reader would need to be logged in to Moodle.
• Fix authentication bugs for annotation update and delete (the operations would fail, but spit out bad PHP error messages instead of failing nicely).
• Hard-code the margin color. I haven't yet worked out to integrate with Moodle's theme system, and in some cases it was coming out bright green.

Release Notes for 2005-08-16 (stand-alone)

• The Apache mod_rewrite dependency is now optional. This should make it easier for developers to install the code in different environments. As important as I believe nice URLs are, the feature was creating too much complication for test installations.

Release Notes for 2005-08-08 (Moodle version)

This release was primarily about integrating the latest stand-alone version with Moodle, but it also included a number of important Moodle bug fixes and some major features also.

• Add search capability to the summary page, including the ability to search public annotations created by other users.
• Create a permalink URL for each message that is not dependent on the forum ID. The permalink.php file redirects any request for that message to the correct forum page. This means that smartcopy links and annotations will not break when a post is moved to a different forum (e.g. with the Split admin function).
• Always display annotations in the summary, even if the associated post has been deleted. Annotations belong to their creator, not the author of the annotated resource.
• Make the create annotation button light up in yellow - the same color as the highlights - when the mouse is over it. Doesn't work in IE.
• Fix the height of the create annotation button in IE.
• Remove the name of the author of the annotated resource from the summary page (it was too cluttered).
• Remove the RSS/Atom link from the summary page (its role was ambiguous and the content of the feed did not match the search criteria for the page).
• Delete a user's annotation when the user is deleted; update annotations appropriately when a username changes.
• Generalize the summary page implementation, so that it's easy to support summaries if annotation support is added elsewhere in Moodle.

Release Notes for 2005-08-08 (stand-alone and Moodle)

This release focused on bug fixes and edge cases:

• Optimize word counting. Subjectively, I would say this produced about a 3-5x speedup for annotation creation and display.
• When displaying annotations, detect changes to the document. If the annotation highlight no longer refers to the correct piece of text, don't display the highlight or note and provide a visual indication that there's a problem. In Moodle, this links to a summary page showing the problem annotations. This isn't visible on IE.
• Fix a problem that sometimes caused notes to line up incorrectly with the corresponding highlight region.
• Use microformat-style abbr title for smartcopy dates.
• Limit note and quote lengths to 250 and 1000 words respectively.
• Deal correctly with cases in which users create post content containing class names used by the application. It should be impossible for a user to confuse the annotation code by using specific HTML tags and class values.
• Now that Atom is done, discard RSS 2 support.
• Fix Enter to save annotations on IE.

Release Notes for 2005-07-28 (stand-alone version)

This release involved important bug fixes and lots of new code, but had little impact on the interface:

• Internet Explorer and Firefox modify whitespace in HTML files. This led to a difference in how they measured offsets, so that highlights created in one could be misplaced in the other. I replaced character offsets with word+character offsets. This affects the database, the protocol, and the internal implementation. As a result, highlights drop leading and trailing whitespace. This release is noticably slower due to the extra calculation involved (this may be optimized in future versions).
• Highlight em tags were being inserted around all text nodes within a highlighted range. This was incorrect: some HTML elements, such as tr and ul do not allow em as a child element. The application now checks against the content model for parent elements so that em tags are placed appropriately.
• Creating annotations sometimes caused the browser to scroll away from the area where the new annotation was created, which was very confusing. The application now prevents this by saving and restoring the browser scroll position.

Release Notes for 2005-07-19 (stand-alone version)

Since the 2005-06-21 release, I have made a number of changes. The main new features are:

• Full support for Internet Explorer. This includes code to extract the location of user-selected text in the document. Unfortunately, IE crashes from time to time while creating, updating, and deleting annotations. The code for determining the location of the selection is in see getSelectionRangeIE() in domutil.js; I don't believe it's involved in the crashes if you want to use it for something else.
• Much refactoring to reduce the use of Javascript closures and clear links between DOM and Javascript objects. This is to prevent IE from leaking memory, and may have improved (though not solved) the crash situation. Part of this involved reducing the scope of changes to the document when annotations are modified (e.g., when an annotation is deleted other annotations are not redrawn). This clean-up is ongoing.
• Smart Copy for Firefox. Ordinary copy-paste operations using the mouse include additional information about the source of the copied text.
• Partial support for annotations by multiple users. A small icon next to the x button (which deletes an annotation) can be toggled between public and private states. However, this has no other effect in the stand-alone implementation, but the Moodle version uses it to provide the ability to search and view annotations by other users.
• The ability to view annotations in Safari. Safari does not provide a way to discover the location of a text selection, so it is not possible to create annotations.
• A shift to the Atom 1.0 namespace for the annotation XML protocol.
• Overlapping highlights indicate the overlap by a darker background color (it's just a CSS trick, but I think it's cool).
• More consistent field, parameter, and database column names.

Release Notes for 2005-07-20 (stand-alone version)

• I believe I've fixed the crash on Internet Explorer. The problem was the normalize function in IE's DOM, which is buggy and sometimes crashes the browser. Now, the application simply doesn't call that function on IE. The result should be that the text on the page becomes increasingly fragmented, which should eventually slow down the application. If IE is buggy enough, it might crash it. I need to write my own version of normalize for Exploder
• Better compliance with the Atom 1.0 specification, though not yet to the point where it validates.