Another important user need is to annotate documents. That basically means that I should be able to add a comment to a paragraph in your document, and then when I give it back to you, you can read through the annotation and see if you agree or not. Note that the text of the annotation is not really a proposed change to the document, it’s more likely to be a note like, “hey Ron, did you run a usability test on this.”

Word’s solution is to have a separate document stream whose elements are anchored to ranges of text in the main document. That means that you could move the main document range and the annotation follows. You can view the annotations in a separate pane, or print them if you like.

An interesting Web consideration is whether browsers should make annotations available or not. They might be a neat way to hide less critical text from the user, without requiring a hyperlink and a separate download request.