Constraints have been shown to generally improve innovation. Giving targets and parameters helps ensure a team is working in unison. Identifying what is out of bounds can further focus that team.
What I sense is a real tension between the web as we know it, and the web as it would be. It’s the tension between an existing medium, the printed page, and its child, the web. And it’s time to really understand the relationship between the parent and the child, and to let the child go its own way in the world.
Generally speaking (and ignoring questions of styling, API availability, etc.), an ideal Web annotation pattern follows these principles:
Annotations appear in close visual proximity to the primary content.
Their design neither distracts from nor hides the primary content.
The preceding principles are followed regardless of screen width.
The only pattern I’ve found that meets these criteria is FiveThirtyEight’s.
...As it turns out, FiveThirtyEight didn't invent this pattern. It likely originated in medieval illuminated manuscripts which contain “interleave notes” — comments written literally between the lines.
Irwin's terms of sudden, physical realization – bam! – call to mind the suddenly enlightening Zen slap or rap on the forehead. It also calls to mind [Philip Guston]'s own remark..."Look at any inspired painting...it's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation." Reverberation is another way of suggesting a kind of sudden, energetic, physical experience.