Tips 'n Tricks: Deep Link to Any Text of Any Web Page

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Okay OEG Connect, an open call here to share your favorite Tips and Tricks that you use in your everyday online work, something that is likely helpful to someone else. These are the kind of contributions we hope you can make to this space. Ideally post them here in the OE Sharing Zone but they can be added any where, just use the new tag tips-n-tricks (and note that preceding a topic tag with a # sign makes it a link) (that is a tip!)

I have noticed for quite some time that often a google search returns a result with a lot of extra stuff on the link, but also opens the page to a specific portion of text on a page, that is also highlighted.

What? How about a sample to read an interesting observation on AI made by Dan Cohen.

Did you see that, it’s not just a link to one of Dan’s Newsletters, it scrolls to a precise location, and highlights a portion of text.

Anyone thinks this is useful? In a learning context, to have students focus on a key phrase or maybe a summary statement, you can link directly to it!

I learned that this making use of a not well known HTML feature called Text Fragments (maybe not an intuitive name). I like blogging so shared my tip here

You can link directly to any portion of text on any web page that you can select with your mouse. To make this link in Google Chrome, select the text, then right/control click to use the contextual menu, and select Copy Link to Highlight

portion of text selected highlighted on a web page, an arrow leading to a pop up menu with Copy Link to Highlight selected
portion of text selected highlighted on a web page, an arrow leading to a pop up menu with Copy Link to Highlight selected2014Ă—462 225 KB

Give it a try, and reply with an example you were able to create. And let us all know if this is useful, and/or in what way.

I bet everyone here has a favorite tip or trick. How about adding it to the Sharing Zone and using that lovely tag tips-n-tricks

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Shuana Niessen reacted to your message:
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Love this, Alan, thanks for sharing!

It reminds me of a presentation I went to at one of the Domains conferences where the Hypothes.is people were talking about a new specification which allowed one to point to particular parts of objects on the web: those would be the things that were highlighted and discussed in Hypothes.is threads.

Although I though I remembered those specifications as more along the lines of “between this and that timestamp in an audio or video” or “in this rectangular region in a PDF”. I remember thinking at the time that pointing to particular stops in digital objects on the web had to be a useful feature – as you are pointing out now!

Cool!

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I’ve done this with Hypothesis before, but it’s cool you can do it without. Is there an easy way to make it work in Firefox?

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The links work in Firefox, but from a quick scan it’s not yet a browser feature implemented (looks requested). There is an add-on that should provide it

It would not take much to create a bookmarklet. I might give that a go.

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Barely tested and I will blog post it soon, but try this TextFrag bookmarklet, drag the link to your Firefox browser bar.

Then, select a very interesting sentence, say from an Ars Technica post on ancient crayon marks, click the bookmarket, and the full text highlighted link opens in a new tab.

Copy that link and run with it. Try my example made in Firefox.