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I've seen tools that let you highlight and/or annotate webpages and save those annotations online. I'm interested in finding a tool that will allow me to do the same thing on a webpage and save the highlights or invitations with the webpage inside a single MHT file so that I can reopen the file locally and retain my notes. Is this possible? It can be a browser add-on or a standalone separate program.

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I don't think so in general. This is something we should have had long ago (including SVG-based freehand annotation), but we still don't have decent solutions. There are some things you could use for highlighting or adding notes to the end of a page/section, which can be saved as MAFF (with the Firefox "Mozilla Archive Format" extension). They should work with MHT as well, although I can't say for sure. MHT is a weird proprietary format. If you use FF, MAFF is probably a better way to save websites, it's basically just a zip archive of the webpage and its resources (so you can just unzip it and view it with anything).

  • The markit highlighter bookmarket copies a page to the markit website and then lets you highlight it. It doesn't require registration and it's fairly lightweight. You can save the page as MAFF and it will be saved with the annotations

  • If you want to add some notes to the end of a page (or in the middle, although they'll be styled normally), you could use a bookmarklet. If you save the following as the location in a bookmark, with a name like "edit current page", it will let you edit a webpage when you click it:

    javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true';document.designMode='on';void(0)

    Note: any keys that perform functions in your browser will still be intercepted and perform those functions. In particular, if the space bar does a page down, it will still do so rather than entering a space. In this case, the easiest solution would be to copy a space and then Ctrl-v paste it for spaces. (Otherwise, you could use an extension or setting that lets you disable that keybinding.)

    If you want to use it together with markit, you need to use markit first, since it won't copy your changes. Also, it's highly unreliably trying to edit directly after using markit, so highlight, then click the markit icon to go to your markit page and click the link that takes you back to your highlighted page. Then you can edit the page.

  • There are plenty of screenshot and annotation bookmarklets/webapps/extensions that let you make an image of a page and draw/type over it. Those are of limited use for text-based content, though.
  • Keep in mind you could always convert a page to another format (eg. PDF) and annotate that.
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