Google recently released a Chrome extension that lets you create a direct link to a word or sentence on a website. A code change request that I spotted today talks about making this work without an extension.
Update: This is now available in the Canary channel of Google Chrome.
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Copy Link To Text
Copy Link To Text, or Link to Text Fragment is recently announced Chrome feature.
Here is how it works.
You are on a website and you found an interesting sentence that you want to share with your friends. To highlight that specific part of the article, you will have to send additional information like subsection or paragraph number etc to your friends.
Another option is to take a screenshot and highlight the text.
What if you can send a direct link to a word or sentence?
That’s what “Copy Link to Text” does.
You can select a word or sentence, right-click and the Chrome extension will let you create a direct link. Your friends will directly reach that part of the article, with your selected text highlited.
Making this built-in
Google is now planning to make this a built-in Chrome feature. With that, there is a possibility of this feature becoming available by default on other Chromium-based browsers like Edge.
The code that I found today adds the following experimental flag to Chrome:
“Copy Link To Text: Adds an item to the context menu to allow a user to copy a link to the page with the selected text highlighted.”
Summary
This is an experimental flag and may or may not make it to the Stable version of Chrome. However, when it does, this will change the way we share websites and articles on the web.
Google is already using something similar to search. You might have noticed Google sending you directly to a sentence on a website, with the text highlighted with a yellow background.
This behavior will soon become omnipresent on the web.
Source: Chromium Gerrit.
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