Hi folks,

Thanks for your help. A while back we divided the Hypothesis sidebar into tabs to clearly separate Annotations (notes that anchor to text in the document) from Page Notes (notes that refer to the document as a whole).

So, for example:

Now another tab is about to appear, currently labeled Orphans. It looks like this:

I’m seeing the Orphans tab here because I’m logged into a Hypothesis staff account for which that feature is selectively enabled.

We’ve also now selectively enabled it for you folks so we can invite your reactions and feedback.

In this example, 9 of the 10 annotation were actually orphans, which means they anchored to parts of the page that no longer exist. Hypothesis remembers them but cannot anchor them to the page. Formerly they showed up in the sidebar mixed in with Annotations and Page Notes, but nothing happened when you clicked them. Now we show them in a separate Orphans tab.

Some questions we’re wondering about:

1. Does the word Orphans make sense given what we’ve described?
2. Are the three concepts -- Annotations, Page Notes, Orphans -- clear to you,or if not, what would help to clarify?

Note that pages like www.nytimes.com or twitter.com are unusual. Because they constantly change, you can’t expect annotations to anchor there for long. Most pages you look at won’t be this dynamic, and won’t have any orphans -- in which case, the Orphans tab won’t appear.

So, you may want to try altering a page of your own to explore how this works. If you move a paragraph, annotations on it should still anchor and appear in the Annotations tab. If you delete a paragraph, though, annotations on it should now appear in the Orphans tab.

It’s admittedly a thorny thicket of concepts, we’re trying to present things in ways that make sense, and we’d love to know your feedback. If you provide them as annotations on this page, we’d be delighted to read and respond.

Thanks!