FragmentIdentifier

Inspiration

Ever needed a way to highlight a web page?

How about pass that highlighting onto someone else?

Or direct someone to a particular part of a web page?

Printing out the web page and using a highlighter works, but consumes trees.

The newly proposed and implemented ScrollToTextFragment extends the Fragment Identifier to do the job.

Background

The Fragment Identifier is the part in the some url's like this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cat&oldid=916388819#Whiskers

This suffix on the URL jumps to a particular anchor or Fragment Identifier of a page,

in this case Whiskers in the Wikipedia article on Cats.

While this is wonderful, the author or content generation engine has to create the needed named anchor or DIV ID tag before the page is sent to the user. The user had few ways to scroll to a section of a web page, or highlight the important content.

Development

A new method, using a new Fragment Identifier as a suffix, allows scrolling to text and highlighting text.

As of July, 2020, Chromium-based browsers, including Google Chrome and Microsoft revised Edge browsers, now support the proposed standard known as Text Fragments. The feature is also referred to ScrollToTextFragment and is discussed in the Introduction to Text Fragments.

Example

The following URL allows us to highlight Like almost the Felidae and antiskidding .

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cat&oldid=916388819#:~:text=Claws-,Like%20almost,the%20Felidae%2C,-cats&text=antiskidding

The browser will automatically scroll to the first of these and highlight the text in yellow as shown: