Annotation Hangs for Texts of Any Reasonable Size

[rgrp]

The js annotation breaks down for the large texts because of well-known limitations of the marginalia system used by annotater. Possible ways to solve this:

1. Upgrade to more recent (2007) release of marginalia which uses a much more efficient way of calculating and locating ranges. (Downside: this breaks IE support)
2. Chunk texts into short sections. This should speed up range resolution considerably (though not yet tested). Downside: cannot annotate across sections and text is now divided arbitrarily into different bits.

[rgrp]

This is a rather complicated thing to do nicely, particularly in a pluggable way. For the time being I suggest we switch to using the external  http://www.co-ment.net/ service. Once we have nicely functioning javascript system we can then move back.

Of course before any move is carried out we should test the co-ment system on large texts.

[rgrp]

Propose to defer this issue for the time being. Text formats are currently in some degree of flux (will we stay with plain text or move to xml or ...) and it does not make sense to put stuff in co-ment until these are stabilised.

[rgrp]

Ticket is wontfix as:

1. provision of annotation has been deprecated for a while in favour of co-ment
2. If we do create a new annotation facility this will be written from scratch (and won't be upgrading to new marginalia)