Brat's spiritual successor, still in beta

What it does Poplar renders text annotations directly in the browser, letting you highlight entities and draw relations between them via SVG. It’s a TypeScript component you drop into an HTML element, feed some JSON, and configure to taste. The API surface is deliberately small: new Annotator(data, element, config) and you’re annotating.

The interesting bit The project openly cops to being “not production ready” — a rare honesty that saves you from discovering it the hard way. It’s also a ground-up rewrite of an earlier internal tool, which explains both the cleaner API and the remaining rough spots.

Key highlights

• Renders annotations as SVG overlays on text, not canvas or foreign objects
• Ships as an npm package (poplar-annotation) with TypeScript definitions
• Inspired by brat’s visual design but built for modern bundlers
• Live demo at synyi.github.io/poplar to test before integrating
• API docs and developer guides exist in-repo, not just README promises

Caveats

• Explicitly marked “not production ready” by the maintainers
• 529 stars suggests niche usage; expect to hit edge cases
• Support channel appears to be a single email contact

Verdict Worth a look if you’re building an in-house NLP labeling interface and want something lighter than full brat deployment. Skip it if you need battle-tested stability or enterprise support yesterday.