Kommentator

Kommentator lays a layer of comments over an existing web page. Mark passages of text, click on elements, pin points, each with a note attached. Nothing about the page itself changes. It is two files you place alongside it.

Feedback on a web page arrives as running text in an email, as a Word file with screenshots, or as a note from a phone call. "The heading at the bottom of the second page" then has to be found again. That is laborious and hard to organise.

Tools exist that solve this. They are capable, but they cost money and tie you to an account, a subscription and someone else’s server, which brings a data protection review with it. For a sign-off round with four people that is out of proportion. So I built Kommentator.

You include two files and call one line of code. The notes column and the menu appear by themselves. For WordPress there is a ready-made plugin.

Those commenting mark text with mouse or touch, across several paragraphs if needed, click on whole elements, or place a pin at a particular spot. The anchoring follows the W3C standard for web annotation: comments reliably find their place again when reloaded.

Each person exports their feedback as a file. You read these files in together, and duplicates drop out. Anyone with many pages and many participants can instead set up a collection point, such as a spreadsheet where new comments accumulate automatically.

Without that setting, nothing leaves the browser. No cookies, no tracking, no external requests, no IP addresses.

The name field attributes, it does not protect. Anyone using the collection point should know that its address sits in the page source, which cannot be avoided in a tool that runs in the browser. Anyone who knows it can write into it. For that reason the plugin ships with the restriction to logged-in users switched on; for static pages this is a matter for the server setup.

It is not a ticket system. Comments have no status, no assignment, no deadlines. What becomes of a piece of feedback is managed elsewhere.

And it comments on a web page, not a file. For a PDF, a text or a draft you need something else.

Out of sign-off rounds. Building a page is one thing; systematically recording what needs changing is another. Kommentator provides a place for that: where the feedback belongs.

The source code is public on GitHub, under an MIT licence. No dependencies, no build step.