fig3 the operation of the system during playback is shown in fig7 as described in the afore mentioned u s pat no 5 838 313 annotations are played by processing each event that has been stored in turn while maintaining the timing as much as possible in the case of new_document events the id of the document is passed to the traditional browser modules for loading and rendering any subsequent events such as drawing of lines or mouse gestures are displayed on the new document in this way annotations over multiple documents can be played a difficulty posed by multiple document annotation as opposed to single document annotation is that the time required to load and render a new document is not consistent from recording to playback or even from one playback to another this is particularly true with www documents for which the loading time can vary substantially at playback time this can cause the recorded audio and events which are on an absolute timeline to become unsynchronized with the associated document in the present invention this problem is solved by pausing both the recording and playback of annotations during the loading and rendering of new documents specifically when a new_document event is processed in watch mode playback is paused until the browser notifies the playback module that loading and rendering are complete further the timestamps of all events are stored and interpreted relative to the completion of the loading of the most recent document in.