Allow any character in textbound annotation span

[spyysalo]

The current serverside and storage implementation does not allow textbound annotation spans to include newline or tab characters.

To avoid the restrictions this implies, the format and related functionality should be revised to support some form of escaping. Standard C-style escapes (\n for newline, \t for tab, \\ for backslash etc.) would be one obvious possibility.

[ghost]

I reside in camp get-rid-of-the-bloody-text-component, sanity checking has no place in a storage format and the implications of the escaping means that you can't analyse the output as real text any more. I would suggest creating a set of tools for working with the format from a command line instead if you want fast and easy analysis.

[spyysalo]

Sanity checking absolutely does have a place in a standoff format used for import/export; it would be begging for trouble to take this out.

[ghost]

@spyysalo: I agree with you on the import/export portion, I still hate the text component though since it is:

• "Hard" to parse
• Needs escaping to support text in the first place
• If it is escaped it can't be treated as text if you use cut on it (meh!)