Stacking overlaping annotations

[zouharvi]

There is an unexpected side effect of allowing overlapping annotations by also allowing the same error type over the same span.

Sorry, my mouse is not visible in the recording (thanks to latest Wayland update). But just clicking multiple times creates the underline overflow.

Screencast.from.2025-01-25.16-15-29.webm

Is this the desired behaviour? Or are we using that to signify e.g. error severity?

[kasnerz]

Tough question 😄 For one, it's the default behavior we got after implemented it.

Until now I also thought it's a good behavior, as it allows to annotate multiple spans of the same category that are (somehow) overlapping. For example here, I annotated both "Parla Sonic 3.5 is a smartphone" and "smartphone that was released in 2013":

But now I see there are some issues with that:

• The rendering algorithm does not make it very clear since the level of the second annotation drops to the level of the first annotation after the overlap.
• People could over-annotate a single span by inadvertently misclicking multiple times.
• I cannot think of a case where this would be really necessary.

So I guess we can always disallow overlapping spans of a single category.

[tuetschek]

I'm still not sure it's a bad behavior... I annotated this and it made sense to me:

• Gusty winds aren't noticeable at dawn on Tuesday
• There's no weather change on Tuesday

[kasnerz]

I made a compromise 🙃

We now forbid multiple equivalent annotations (same span, same type): #201 .