Annotation is now a web standard
Is anyone using these?  The blog post is put out by a company I've never heard of, and the credits listed on it include nobody who works on a browser, no major websites, and no comment-widget company.<p>Historically, web standards where a committee gets together and decides how a feature is going to look without the buy-in of users or browser vendors have a very poor track record of adoption.  The way actually-successful web features get standardized is that users start clamoring for it, which leads someone to build a hacked-up JS implementation of it, which leads to a company founded around that hacked-up JS implementation, which leads to competition, which leads to browser vendors building it into the browser, which leads to an open standard.<p>Trying to skip steps doesn't seem to work.  If you build the feature without users who want it, nobody will use it.  If you build the company without the prototype, you won't get a working implementation.  If you build it into the browser when there's a dominant monopoly company, people will continue to use the company rather than the browser's version (this is the story of Google vs. IE+Bing & Facebook vs. RSS & semantic web).  If you standardize it before it's been adopted by multiple browsers, people will ignore the standard (this is the story of RDF, the semantic web, and countless other W3C features that have fallen into the dustbin of history).<p>And if any one of those parties are not at the table when the standard is written, they'll ignore the standard anyway.