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There is a downside to this page saving however: Roohit doesn’t save the graphics and embedded content (such as Flash movies) on the page, just the HTML and the related style sheets. This means that when an original page changes and loses, for example, an image the context of the saved text in terms of order will be correct. That said, the page layout may get corrupted due to the missing items that in and of themselves control the size of things like table cells.

An interesting social networking feature of the Instant Web Highlighter is that through the control panel you can also enable the display of markup other people have done to the page you are on.

Another problem for Roohit is that when the Instant Highlighter service is engaged some sites don’t like the result. For example, both Blogger and The New York Times display their 404 messages when loaded via Roohit. In the case of my own site, gibbs.com, Roohit somehow interferes with the URL causing my ASP routing script that redirects aliased domains to subdirectories to fail.

Through the Roohit control panel you can e-mail clips to other people, jump to the index of your saved clips on the Roohit site, and load new pages. The Roohit control panel – which is actually rather unattractive – can be reduced to either a mini or an even smaller micro version but in all sizes case the control panel can’t be moved to another location other than the top right hand of the browser page.

Roohit is different. It uses techniques that I haven’t seen before and has a clever architecture but it needs a lot more polishing in terms of getting rid of bugs and improving the look and feel of its interface. Conclusion: Roohit is worth keeping an eye on.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.