DOM changes to insert highlights around text blocked in Notion

[dwhly]

The selected highlight and the ability to scroll to the highlight by the H annotation client aren't working on Notion web pages-- presumably because our mutations that wrap text nodes in <hypothesis-highlight> elements get stripped out.

We get console warnings like the following:

I noticed a similar issue on another project, which ultimately was resolved... possibly in the new editor launched earlier in the year?:
obahareth/notion-rtl#28 (comment)

Given that web annotation and the mechanisms to make it work on the DOM are a larger class of problem I'm curious if there are elegant ways of addressing this, possibly collaboratively between teams.

[dwhly]

@justjake We'd be thankful for any perspective you could share here.

[robertknight]

Given that web annotation and the mechanisms to make it work on the DOM are a larger class of problem I'm curious if there are elegant ways of addressing this, possibly collaboratively between teams.

The CSS Highlight API allows creating highlights without modifying the DOM, so can be used in some cases to avoid creating a conflict with the page's own UI rendering. The current API is missing direct support for interactive highlights. It also faces the theoretical problem that the web application could choose to re-render the UI and "destroy" the highlights at any time.

The other direction is to take some kind of static snapshot of the UI and annotate that.