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Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

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Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#131

Post by pexaizix »

_bxg1 wrote: post #14

It seems like more and more, Google is leveraging their near-monopoly on web browsing to just skip the proposal process and do whatever they want without discussion.

Reading the comments on this post and all seems to be envy.

While Chrome does useful stuff like this, Firefox progress in the web space is... eh... adding ads to the home page?

Maybe Firefox should've went with a proposal on how to add ads into the browser, or on how to send all of your URL history to a third party. :^)

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#132

Post by pgeorgi »

frobozz wrote: post #90
pgeorgi wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

web standards are descriptive not prescriptive, and have always been: nobody asked before adding the tag to their web browser, it was just added (and later removed) after it was used by more than one implementation and consensus was found how it's supposed to behave. For example, WebSQL died because there was only one implementation: implementations come before the standards.

Not strictly true. In the W3C process, a Working Draft can be written before any implementations. Even a CR doesn't need to have been realised. To progress to PR and Recommendation, it needs to have implementations. WHATWG is more descriptive, HTML 5 has been described as a collection of everything Hixie has seen somewhere on the web and thought cool.

Not strictly true, okay.

Still, it's nothing new that browser vendors just add the things they think may be useful and see what sticks (which then eventually ends up in some standard at some point like asm.js/WebAssembly - or fizzles out like NaCl).

These days with vendor prefixes, polyfills and generally a focus on backward compatibility there's typically some care taken to not leave users of other browsers in the dust.

That's very different from past efforts like, for example, ActiveX which made a full (but undocumented) Win32 environment part of the web browser design.

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#133

Post by lucideer »

xg15 wrote: post #109

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. In the blog post, there doesn't seem to be anything addressing this (or even just specifying how…

> It's an abuse of the purpose of URL fragments

So what they're saying is, they expect a clash of their abuse of URL fragments with others' abuse of URL fragmentsto be rare because...

The arrogance here is astounding: "It's OK for us to use this, because others shouldn't be using it"

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#135

Post by afandian »

will_pseudonym wrote: post #108
afandian wrote: post #97

Something open, standardized, quite similar and already working is Web annotations. This includes 'robust anchoring' capability which could surely be used to solve this problem. https://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Hypothes.is is a well established open implementation.

https://web.hypothes.is/ is the URL parent was referring to, but there was a typo. This looks similar to Genius.com's annotations. I wonder how this will evolve with multiple providers allowing similar functionality. Ideally you'd be able to combine annotation networks for a single URI to get all possible annotations you want on a given page. Problems with these types of systems are the same as product reviews like o…

Hypothes.is is general purpose but has a focus on scholarship. They have different namespaces (including global) and work with different communities (and customers) to provide overlaid environments.

Moderation and curation are perennial issues. Maybe these ovelays will help. It's not the same, but Reddit has different communities on different subreddits (with different moderation policies) discussing the same thing.

And re portability, they've made some very encouraging noises about data portability and exhange. It's baked ito the standard, and their default content license is, I believe CC something.

Thanks for catching the typo!

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#136

Post by ajnin »

k_bx wrote: post #115
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what people click on email, thanks to gmail rewriting all links to a google track url (while misleading the user by a fake status text on mouse over) They use the same trick for Google Search in a way that is transparent to the user - as long as you have JS turned on. When you switch it off, you realize instead of clicking on HNs URL, you actually click https://www.google.com/url?q=https://news.ycombinator.com/&s..…

This technique (redirecting through some dummy ?url=... page) is a common way of doing an external redirect on any service you're building. It's a simple way of making it impossible to see the actual Referer to external website, which is more secure to your data and the service you're building (e.g. Gmail).

There's a standard way to do that, which is to add a rel="noreferrer" tag to your outgoing links.

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#137

Post by fareesh »

Slartie wrote: post #126
sascha_sl wrote: post #124

Everyone in this thread needs to put their money where their mouth is and go back to Firefox if they're currently using Chrome.

Did exactly this, a few weeks ago. Was heavy Chrome user, now fully on Firefox (and Safari on mobile). I am so satisfied with this decision, and the transition was much easier than expected.

I would do it instantly if the devtools were half as convenient as Chrome. Unfortunately they are super clunky

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#138

Post by cmroanirgo »

SquareWheel wrote: post #51
_bxg1 wrote: post #14

It seems like more and more, Google is leveraging their near-monopoly on web browsing to just skip the proposal process and do whatever they want without discussion.

Do you actually follow spec discussions, or are you just guessing? From what I have observed the Chrome, Firefox, and Safari teams are in constant communication. They discuss new features, implementation details, and potential pitfalls. Despite all the suggestions of "browser wars", they're actually very friendly and collaborative.

The proof is in the article:

> It is most likely that this will be added to other browsers like Firefox too.

> Microsoft’s new version of Edge is going to be based on Chromium, so this will be available on Edge too.

So, although some discussions with Firefox may have begun, it's clearly using the Microsoft decision to use Chromium as a way to force their standpoint. Note also the lack of mention of Safari.

This is the kind of stuff that should go thru a central committee because different browsers will react differently to what should be a simple url.

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#139

Post by martin_a »

sascha_sl wrote: post #124

Everyone in this thread needs to put their money where their mouth is and go back to Firefox if they're currently using Chrome.

Did it on Monday evening. Great choice, no problems at all. Could import all data, also switched to Firefox on my Smartphone where I can now run uBlock, too.

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#140

Post by csarven »

I would like to urge the browser developers/makers to adopt existing proposals which came through open consensus which do precisely cover the same use cases (and more!)

W3C Reference Note on Selectors and States: https://www.w3.org/TR/selectors-states/

It is part of the suite of specs that came through the W3C Web Annotation Working Group: https://www.w3.org/annotation/

More examples in W3C Note Embedding Web Annotations in HTML: https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-html/

Different kinds of Web resources can combine multiple selectors and states. Here is a simple one using `TextQuoteSelector` handled by the https://dokie.li/ clientside application:

http://csarven.ca/dokieli-rww#selector(type=TextQuoteSelecto...

A screenshot/how-to: https://twitter.com/csarven/status/981924087843950595

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