Markdown vs Hypothesis

Designed to be easy for a human to enter with a simple text editor, and easy to read in its raw form.

Markdown is quickly becoming the writing standard for academics, scientists, writers, and many more. Websites like GitHub and reddit use Markdown to style their comments.

Markdown is ubiquitous. It's supported by nearly everything. The markup available in the common subset of all the many dialects isn't that rich, but it's usually enough to get the job done.

You can convert HTML to Markdown or Markdown to HTML. You can use tools like pandoc to convert to other formats as well.

It is easy to track changes for markdown documents as compared to other formats like doc, html, etc. You only need to place your markdown documents under some version control system.

Hypothesis is completely free and open source, its source code is hosted in GitHub.

Searchable stream of annotations, replies, and email notifications.

You can work in private groups and then publish, keep annotations private, or make it public from scratch.

You can sort by tags, which makes it far more powerful.

Helpful to see what people thought or see useful references they might have left. Useful for group collaborations as well (research groups, book clubs, class study groups, etc)

Most (maybe all) Chromium-based browsers let you use Chrome browser extensions.

Has browser extension for Chrome, which makes the job of annotating web pages even easier.

You can link directly to an annotation.