Education
The new Chrome extension from Google lets you directly link to certain text on a page
Text Fragment Link is a new Google Chrome Extension that allows you to generate URLs for a certain text on the site, irrespective of the formatting of your page.
When the extension is enabled, just click on the text you want to connect to and select "Copy Link to Selected Text." Anyone with a compatible browser can then share and open it.
For example, by clicking this connection in Chrome or Edge, a highlighted section at the bottom of the article will be shown.
The Google extension builds on the new Chromium function known as "Text Fragments," which works by attaching extra details to the URL after a #.
It is the same technology that Google often uses in search results to connect to other parts of a web page. However, if you link to longer sections of text or complex web pages where the same words repeated several times, these URLs are long and difficult to create manually. This extension facilitates the process of creation.
The links that have been created by the extension are version 80 compatible with all Chromium-based browsers, but not all browsers support them.
Google's blog post notes that Firefox and Safari did not say they would implement the feature as of yesterday. When you click a link using these browsers, you simply go to the top without highlighting the text of the linked webpage.
Text fragments are a small but valuable function that makes the discovery of relevant details on a webpage easier. For example, the above paragraph provides a hyperlink directly to the Firefox and Safari compatibility section of the blog post from Google.
In addition, a link to a particular step in a long number, or a certain entry in a best-of-list may be useful.
It offers a promising extension and function, but it's not yet perfect. As I checked the function on Edge, I would sometimes be connected to the right part of the page but the text would not be highlighted.
Often, when I made links, I would have been given an error to highlight a greater part of the text, while a full paragraph had already been chosen.
I couldn't test what was happening to my browser mix, plugins, and the websites I connected to caused these problems.
The Text Fragment extension Link to the Chrome Web Store is now available.
