Creating and sharing Web notes via a standard browser

Today practitioners in education actively publish their instructional materials as HTML documents, using a variety of media. Yet, in most cases, third parties can only passively read the documents displayed in their browsers. This partly accounts for why students in Web-based courses continue to take notes and get feedback on assignments from their teachers on paper documents [9]. In this paper, we describe an intuitve Web annotation environment that allows users to annotate directly on any DHTML-compliant portions of Web page using a standard browser, for private, group or public use along with support for voice synthesis and notification. In makes extensive use of DHTML to realize the interactive markup effects and offers capabilities not available in existing systems. Our implementation is among the few systems currently available that make use of DHTML for creating a wide range of group services within Web browsers.