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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

A long time ago, there was a W3C standard for this called web annotations². It never really caught on, possibly because people and organizations were expected to host their own annotation servers.

NCSA Mosaic had the feature back in 1993. Check out this post from Marc Andreesen on the www-talk list: http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q2/0416.ht...

A rather obscure browser by the W3C called Annotea also had support for web annotations. I vaguely remember downloading and installing it just to try annotations.

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_annotation

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The Genius Web Annotator [1] was quite popular (and funded by Andreessen), though since the pivot into a media company, I believe it's no longer actively developed.

Hypothesis (Hypothes.is) [2] is active [3] and awesome. They are involved in the Web Annotation standardization efforts.

[1]: https://genius.com/web-annotator

[2]: https://web.hypothes.is/

[3]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01427-9

Thanks for the links! I'll do some research before rolling out v2 of my extension.

[2] is very similar to what I want to do. They chose to insert an iframe into the current page and I don't agree with this decision: the extension should have as little access as possible to the page, ideally it only gets a hash of the url.

I was an avid Hypothesis user but since I moved from Chrome to Firefox I stopped using it entirely, waiting for their Firefox extension. It's been years since they promised it.

A FF extension would be ideal. I use FF and have been just pasting the https://via.hypothes.is/ in front of articles or reading on sites with a Hypothesis integration like Outline.com.

There's an active Apache Incubator group on annotation: https://annotator.apache.org/

It's focused on several related specs, like making timestamped copies of pages (like archive.org), selecting ranges in pages, making selections that are resilient to page changes, and maybe more I'm not aware of.

They have a GitHub repo that has some other work as well: https://github.com/apache/incubator-annotator/

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