emphasis inside quotes

[csillag]

I am migrating this from https://github.com/hypothesis/h/issues/816

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@csillag said:

It would be great if we could add emphasis to regions of quotes. We could show these regions in italic.

Emphasis could be entered in one of two ways:

• We could make this editable when we create the annotation. (The quote is already displayed in the editor; and we can select parts of it with the mouse We just need a control button to add emphasis to the selected part. (When doing this, we should add a note saying "emphasis added by ")
• We could try to automatically detect emphasis, when implemented with the commonly used HTML tags. (When doing this, we should add a note saying "emphasis in the original")

On a technical level, we could store the set of character regions for emphasis as a part of the annotation, as a part of the target, along with the quote.

The only tricky part would be how to re-apply the emphasis when the match is not exact. Ideally, we should morph the stored emphasis data to cover the current quote. (But even if that is not possible, and we end up loosing the emphasis in those cases, I think the feature would be still worth having.)

@tilgovi said:

Adding emphasis to the quote is not the way to do this. As we rethink our editor for multi-target annotations we should think instead about the target being metadata which is not shown in the UI the way we have now, but possibly referenced within the body, with arbitrary styling.

[csillag]

Further comment from @tilgovi:

My thinking is that we should move away from our current quote + comment cards and toward rich bodies, where the styling and inclusion of the quote is entirely up to the author. When the author has not explicitly embedded the quote in their body it should be metadata only, visible as a highlight with focus / scroll linked to the sidebar focus / scroll, but not necessarily rendered as we have now. @RawKStar77 does that make sense to you, too?

[csillag]

To @tilgovi:

I think there were too independent concerns mixed up in my original ticket; I should we should take them apart.

1. Capturing pre-existing emphasis in the quoted text. (So that no meaning is lost when we annotate.)
2. Adding presentation data to quotes, by the author of the annotation.

I think your comments respond to concern number 2; concern number 1 is something different.

And yes, I agree than to address concern 2 on the long term, we need more than what I have described above, but I think it could be a first step.

[tilgovi]

Agree. Two separate issues. Which one is this? For capturing original emphasis, the right approach is to show a sanitized version of the HTML we anchor to, instead of the plain text quote from the selector.

[csillag]

Agree. Two separate issues. Which one is this?

Currently, a mix. I'll fork it..