[feature] highlight/annotate non-continuous sequences of text

[jibe-b]

It happens that valuable pieces of text contain parts that we don't want to highlight.

A behaviour like

• select some text
• press and hold Ctrl and select some more text
• then press Highlight or Annotate"

would then create one annotation with the selected text as target and an indication such as [...] to indicate the brank.

[robertknight]

The annotation model in Hypothesis supports this, in that a single annotation can refer to multiple pieces of a document. Firefox actually supports creating discontiguous selections natively IIRC, but no other browser does.

In order to devote attention to supporting this in the client, we'd need to have some compelling use cases though.

[jibe-b]

Here is a use-case:

the manual annotation of named-entities in order to constitute a supervised machine learning training set requires non-continuous annotation of sequences of text.

Named-entity recognition by text-mining requires to annotate strings with the class to which the string is an instance.