Issue on the comment section of a medium.com blog

[i2]

Hi everyone,

I just noticed neither the Chrome extension nor the bookmarklet work on the comment section of this website.

To elaborate the issue, it seems, you can either open the comment section (bottom of the article) OR open hypothesis side panel but NOT BOTH, i.e. if you open the comment section you can't fully open hypothesis (essentially making it useless) and vice versa if you have the hypothesis open, you can't see the comment section.

[robertknight]

Getting the Hypothesis client and comment section to show up at the same time is just the first problem. The comment section in Medium is a complex web application which can show different comments depending on the selected settings, which reply buttons are expanded, how far you've scrolled inside the comment pane and so on. Hypothesis would need to understand all of that to work with it "fully", in the sense that you can annotate the page, then come back to it later and see the annotations in context. Realistically, this is something we are not going to have the bandwidth to do.

What might be more practical is to enable taking a static snapshot of the page at a point in time and then providing a view where that can be annotated.

[i2]

@robertknight This leads me to a semi-related issue I've been having for many years now: Is it possible in Hypothesis to manually add a highlight/page-note for a website?

I'll elaborate:
There are a bunch of websites on which, for whatever reason, Hypothesis sidebar doesn't even show up. But I still would love to have a section of it highlighted/page-noted and added it to my hypothesis database. I wish there was a way to specify a URL, and a note to be added for such cases. Possible already?

[robertknight]

You can add an annotation to an explicitly specified URL using the API, but there is no user interface for this.