The ability to highlight text, right-click, and select “Copy link to highlight” was added to Chrome back in April, giving users a quick way to anchor to a specific location on a web page for clarity. Now, as discovered by About Chromebooks, this feature may soon be expanding to include the direct location sharing of images, video, and more.
According to an explainer on Github, multiple directives or values can be applied or mixed with text fragments in order to link to a variety of media types or fragments. In the below example, the plan was to use a value of “img” in the linked URL to take the user directly to the image in question.
Prototype CSS selector fragments
Add CssSelectorFragmentAnchor to work as proposed in the explainer, https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment/blob/main/EXTENSIONS.md#proposed-solution Using :target for now, and scrolling the element to the center of the viewport.
Chromium Gerrit
These “CSS selector fragment anchors” will be enabled via a developer flag before the feature releases to the public, and will allow you to right-click any images, videos, or similar page elements, choose the same “Copy link to highlight”, and share it out to your friends. Kevin of About Chromebooks believes that this feature could release at some point over the next few weeks, and we’ll update you when it does!
Being able to share direct anchor links to any type of content greatly expands Chrome’s sharing capabilities, and it’s an exciting prospect. Is this something you would use to point a finger directly at a specific something on a web page instead of sharing the full page with your friends and family, or are you generally much more interested in sharing just and only the full page so that the recipient gains only the overall context? I can see such sharing methods becoming commonplace, though, so I’m down for it!
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