In February the W3C approved recommendations to enable annotation on the web. There is a long lineage of annotation tools that enable readers of the web to write comments that overlay content and attach to selections within it. Users of such tools will be happy to know that annotations can now be represented, stored, and exchanged by interoperable clients and servers. But the broader significance of this new standard is that, by defining how applications refer to selections within content, it increases the granularity of the web’s address space in ways that benefit many existing applications and will enable new ones.
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