The opportunity to highlight and annotate the web pages of third parties has been available for some time. Such consumer additions offer advantages in education and for the concept of the participatory web. The limitation of what has been available has been the unique approaches that were used – the individual adding the annotations and the individual wishing to view annotations had to be running similar software.
With the assignment of a web standard, this would not have to be the case. Software complying with this standard could originate from different sources and still allow annotations to be added and viewed.