(2017-02-24) Annotation Is Now A Web Standard

Annotation is now a web standard

Yesterday when the W3C, the standards body for the Web, standardized Annotation.

The W3C standards are a key milestone towards a future in which all pages could support rich layers of conversation without requiring any action by their publishers—because that capability can be built into the browser itself and be available as a native feature like search.

What’s not covered are how users might annotate in groups or what kind of permissions can be set. Should replies be threaded? Can other users be followed? To help encourage these kinds of discussions, and also to support the implementation of this technology by publishers and others, in December of 2015 we formed the Annotating All Knowledge coalition, which now includes over 70 major publishers, platforms, institutions and companies.

Nick Stenning, whose open source, AnnotatorJS, became the most widely adopted early implementation of a client server annotation architecture. This allowed many, including ourselves at Hypothesis, where he is now our lead developer, to have an excellent example to experiment with.