Simple Web Annotator

Userscript for use with Greasemonkey / Tampermonkey / Violentmonkey / whatever

Highlights webpages, adds margin notes. Saves in localStorage and exports JSON.

Minimalist / feature-poor / other buzzwords. Probably not as good as [insert any other similar project] but those tend to come with subscriptions, cloud sync, SaaS, cross-platform integrations, collaboration features, etc. I did not need those. I just wanted to highlight some pages for future reference.

Tested with Greasemonkey + Firefox

Features

• Highlight text
• Different highlight colors
• Add notes to highlights
• Show notes in margins
• Import / Export as JSON
• Toggle on / off
• Configurable (just edit the script)

What Does Not Work

• DOM manipulations are fragile (turns out that is actually a rather difficult problem)
• Imports can be fragile / incorrect (same problem as above)
• Websites change, annotations anchors in storage do not - highlights can break over time

What to Use Instead (for more features)

Hypothesis seems least bad of the "feature-rich" options. https://web.hypothes.is/