Notes vs. marks
Two different annotation primitives, often confused, with very different design implications.
A mark is a gesture — underline, dog-ear, asterisk. It is information about where, not what. The reader marks a paragraph because something happened there; the what is recoverable from re-reading.
A note is prose. It contains an idea that the original text does not. The note can survive without its anchor, and frequently outlives it.
Most reader software collapses the two into a single thing called “highlight.” This is the source of an enormous amount of grief, because the affordances each wants are different:
- Marks want to be invisible until you scan for them, fast to make, positionally exact, and quietly indexable.
- Notes want to be visible while you read, expandable, full text, and network-connectable to other notes.
For Margin I’m leaning toward two distinct primitives, and a small ritual — a promotion — by which a mark becomes a note when the reader decides it deserves prose.
See the related discussion in A reader's stance § a small list of things.
Pointed at by
A reader's stance — a post — “…per-vs-screen]], and the more practical thread in notes-vs-marks.…” read
First prototype reads a paper end-to-end — a timeline-entry — “…doesn't deserve prose. - The "promotion" ritual (notes-vs-marks) is the right thing — it felt like a small, sa……” read
Evergreen notes — a note — “…disagree with him on one small thing, captured in notes-vs-marks: not every annotation should aspire to evergr……” read