Ben Zanin @gnomon@mastodon.social
Public

I really love HTML text fragment URIs¹: they let you append a `...#:~:text=...` fragment to a URL and highlight & jump to a particular span of text anywhere in the page without requiring the document author to have assigned an `id=...` element anchor. Hugely useful.

It took quite a long time for them to land in Mozilla², and it's instructive to take a look through the process of implementing it to see some non-obvious reasons why.

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¹: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/do

²: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.

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Text fragments - URIs | MDN

Text fragments link directly to specific text in a web page, without requiring the page author to add an ID. They use a special syntax in the URL fragment. This feature lets you create deep links to content that you don't control and may not have IDs associated. It also makes sharing links more useful by directly pointing others to specific words. Browsers may differ in how they draw attention to the linked text—usually, the text is scrolled into view and highlighted with color.

developer.mozilla.org · MDN Web Docs

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