Clipping a webpage as webarchive is a great feature. But most of the time I don’t just want to store the webpage in DT. Instead, I strongly feel like to summarize it and write some notes about it. But currently the two ways to do it couldn’t achieve what I need.
One way is to write the notes in “Spotlight Comment”, you can naturally do this by filling in the “notes” text area when using browser extension to clip the webpage. But later I found out the only place to display these notes is one of the columns in the tree panes view mode and it displays as a single line which is far less than the complete comment and hard to edit. If you want to see the whole comment, you’ll have to open the info window which is very inconvenient.
The other way is to create a new note linked to the webpage which already has a built-in template. The problem is, this note is separated from the original file. When I read the original file, I may not even know I’ve written notes about it. And even if I see this in “see also” suggestions, I’ll have to open it as a separated file and switch between the original file(say, the webarchive) and the notes.
The point is, when you summarized or wrote notes about a webarchive or files, the notes became more important than the original files. The notes help you quickly recall the information or judge if it’s the file you need. And only when you need details about this file, then do you read the original files carefully.
So, the annotation or comment for files should be stored integrated with the original file, and be displayed as the same priority and at the same time as the file content. Here’s my suggestion:
- Extent the ability of spotlight comment, would be better if it support RFT. In fact it would be great if you can integrated an RFT file as comments in the original file. And if the file needs to be exported, you can convert RFT plain to conform with the file regulations.
2.Display the comment as an editable multiline text area which can be turned on/off easily. What I imagined is to add a pane in the three panes view which can be turn on/off by a button. So when you read the original files, you can read the comments at the same time, and you can separately scroll the file and the comments. It’s a bit like the presenter notes of keynote, only a single slide is the file.
I know it is a lot to ask, but it really is a critical feature to me.
