Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page
Technical question, apart from the (valid IMO) political arguments: Google's idea to implement this is to append the text fragment to the URL in a "#targetText" pseudo-query-argument in the URL fragment part. This sounds like it would extremely easily break existing web pages who use the fragment part for their own state.<p>In the blog post, there doesn't seem to be anything addressing this (or even just specifying how Chrome would combine the "targetText" fragment with an already existing fragment part)<p>Did they spend any thought on this?<p>Edit: Oh, right, the readme answers this:<p>> <i>Web pages could potentially be using the fragment to store parameters, e.g. <a href="http://example.com/#name=test" rel="nofollow">http://example.com/#name=test</a>. If sites are already using targetText in the URL fragment for their own purposes, this feature could break those sites.</i><p>> <i>We expect this usage to be exceedingly rare. It's an abuse of the purpose of URL fragments and page arguments are typically encoded using the '?' character (e.g. <a href="http://example.com?name=test" rel="nofollow">http://example.com?name=test</a>). Still, we may run an experiment to see if targetText is available enough to use as a reserved token.</i><p>We'll just completely change the commonly understand processing model of fragment identifiers, but it'll be fine since we don't think anyone is using them anyway...<p>No further questions...