Write on this page

Select this sentence with your mouse or your finger, and a pen comes up over it. Try it now, then keep reading with a mark on the page.

Readers have always written in books. The marks that make a copy somebody’s are the reader’s, and a web page has spent thirty years acting as if it could not be touched. This one can be, and it asks for nothing first: no account, no email, no sign-in.

What is on the bar

• The five dots are the highlighter: yellow, green, pink, blue and orange. Pick the one that says why the sentence matters to you.
• Underline draws a pencil line under the words.
• Ring puts a red ballpoint circle round a word or two.
• Note adds a line of your own, on a card under the paragraph.
• Copy quote copies the words with a link back to this exact place.
• Keep on every device gives you a code, or takes your commenter sign-in, and holds your marks on the blog so another device can read them. The public demo of this blog refuses every write, so the button is left off there; in the sandbox it works.

To take a mark back, click it and choose Remove mark.

Where your marks go

Nowhere, unless you ask. A mark is stored in this browser, against the words it sits on, and drawn again the next time you open the page. Nothing is sent, and the person who runs this blog cannot see what you marked.

Because a mark holds on to words and not to a position, it survives the owner fixing a typo three paragraphs up. If the sentence itself is rewritten the mark does not land at all, which is better than landing on the wrong words.

One hand on the page

The yellow strokes and the ring above were put there by the writer. Yours are drawn by the same pen: the same strokes, dealt the same way, so a page you have marked looks like a page somebody has read.