Posted by damir 10/25/2024
Besides XPointer and its precise addressing I used to be very fascinated about more generic link types. I don't remember the spec (was it XLink?) but there was one where source, target and the location where the link was specified were independent. A link could also have multiple ends.
So you could create a personal document that linked a HN comment to two different sentences in a Wikipedia page for example.
https://example.com/page.html#:~:text=[prefix-,]textStart[,textEnd][,-suffix]
https://example.com/page.html#:~:text=...
https://example.com/page.html#:~:text=...¶m2=two&:~:param3=three
WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment#4: "Integration with W3C Web Annotations" (2019): https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment/issues/4#iss...
All meaning all the browsers listed in the linked table. These may be the major browsers, but not all of them.
I don't know how to design it separately. The default is that selections are blue and fragments are purple, but if you choose different colors for both, in line with your color scheme, how will people know which is which? I guess you can still choose different tones of blue and purple.
Why shouldn't selecting text automatically update the address?
> If you’re using Chrome, simply highlight some text, right-click, and you’ll find the “Copy link to highlight” option in the context menu
I agree you should prefer IDs but they aren't always available, and often using them is very convoluted for users (how many are going to know how to use the element inspector, or even what an ID is?).
I'm assuming Firefox has this context menu feature on the road map as well, though I suspect it will be a long time before Safari adds it just because Apple.
The average person doesn't even understand a URL at all—as far as they're concerned they're generated by computers for computers and are copied around with little regard for what the various components mean. This feature doesn't change that, it just gives a new way of creating a URL that does something slightly different.