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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

#161

Post by mstade »

leeoniya wrote: post #123
mstade wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe you're misunderstanding what I meant by fragment based navigation – that's probably my fault. I refer to the shebang style fragments, that was used to implement deep linking in primarily JS driven sites. This of course watered down the use of fragments in pages, and nearly made them useless frankly. Ironically, the history API – which of course as you say requires JS to work – is what probably saved fra…

the issue is that your server now needs to somehow understand which part of the path is the "fragment" without any distinguishing characters by which to parse it out of the url. if the server now sees deep urls like `/products/patagonia/parkas`, how does it know which part is the fragment? is it /parkas or /patagonia/parkas? what if you have urls that are not completely uniform? or have different uniformity at differ…

Point isn't so much that the server needs to do anything, you can still just serve up the same response no matter the path, and have the client render different results – just as you would with a shebang style navigation in the past. The difference is that you know have options, which you didn't before since the server never saw the fragment part of the url, only / or /entry-point or whatever. So you can have more complex logic server side (really, this was done in the past long before in-client routing was a thing) but you don't have to, it can still be deferred to the client to deal with. Using shebang style navigation you never even really had the option – the history API enabled this.

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

#162

Post by mstade »

SquareWheel wrote: post #81
mstade wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging from this chart[1], definitely somewhere between 2008 (the x-axis starts at 2009, but if I recall correctly Chrome was released in 2008) and second half of 2012. Possibly the original comment was referring to a larger time span than this, but judging from the linked chart that's when Chrome was still on the up-and-up compared to IE. In my opinion though, this timeframe was 2008 to about 2014, when Google (and…

I remember writing websites at that time. Developers were worried about there being "yet another browser to support". It was a big deal because supporting all the browsers was already a lot of work . Nothing rendered consistently. Javascript would run fine in one browser, but not in other. You got to deal with fun features like quirks mode and worrying about transparent pngs. You had to use Flash if you wanted to emb…

> The idea that we were at some web standards pinnacle in 2008-2012 is crazy to me. The pinnacle is now.

I don't think the point was that we were at a pinnacle in terms of standards quality, completeness, or user agent consistency. Rather I think the point – at least it for me – was that during those years it was more of a conversation, not Google choosing a direction and everyone else more or less forced to follow suit. We are certainly in a better spot today in terms of capability, I agree, but I'm not sure I'd agree that we're in a better spot in terms of collaboration.

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

#163

Post by muthdra »

myfonj wrote: post #84

Back in the days of yore, I've made a super simple userscript [1] that was used in my close circles exactly for this purpose; basically is just window.find(document.location.hash.substring(1)) And yes, it was really convenient to exchange links without need to add "and there search for %word%". I haven't probably seen any other use of window.find [2] ever since. [1] http://userscripts-mirror.org/scripts/review/8356 […

Cool, it's like it's exposing Ctrl+F.

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

#165

Post by chrismorgan »

ru999gol wrote: post #152
csarven wrote: post #140

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 Annotat…

I'm so glad that google just sometimes ignores W3C's horrible design-by-committe nonsense. Its the same reason XHTML failed. #selector(type=TextQuoteSelector,exact=foo) vs. #targetText=foo /edited to be a more fair comparison

Such fragments don’t need to be particularly human-readable, only machine-readable. Given that, greater flexibility is generally a virtue: different matching strategies will work better in different contexts, and different tools can benefit from it. Consider the increased scope of the annotations feature—it’s designed for things like more robust referencing, bookmarking with annotations and other things like that.

There then remains the question of cross-compatibility: do all relevant tools implement the same techniques? That is a legitimate concern, but it’s well-enough specced that it shouldn’t be a problem.

Also as noted, various tools out there already use this format. The Chrome team ignoring that and using their own, functionally inferior format is hostile.

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

#166

Post by martin_a »

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).

> It's a simple way of making it impossible to see the actual Referer to external website

It's about tracking outbound links, not about masking the referrer. As already mentioned, there are standard ways for that.

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

#167

Post by muthdra »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #106
gcb0 wrote: post #80

Real use case for this is so Google can poke into context for links shared via services they have no ownership. They got used to know exactly what people share and, much more importantly, 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). When they sum the info of 1. who send it, 2. who clicked on it, 3. what was the e…

> 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..…

Actually, it seems like the you click on Google Search has the right href (which is what appears on the status text) but it also has a ping attribute to it for tracking.

https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_ping.asp

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

#168

Post by supermatt »

airza wrote: post #155
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…

Good lord, I see pages that would break from this constantly...

you constantly see pages with #targetText=blah fragments?

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

#169

Post by pjmlp »

ru999gol wrote: post #152
csarven wrote: post #140

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 Annotat…

I'm so glad that google just sometimes ignores W3C's horrible design-by-committe nonsense. Its the same reason XHTML failed. #selector(type=TextQuoteSelector,exact=foo) vs. #targetText=foo /edited to be a more fair comparison

W3C takes into consideration any platform where a browser might run, instead of which OSes are supported by Chrome.

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

#170

Post by SquareWheel »

mstade wrote: post #162
SquareWheel wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember writing websites at that time. Developers were worried about there being "yet another browser to support". It was a big deal because supporting all the browsers was already a lot of work . Nothing rendered consistently. Javascript would run fine in one browser, but not in other. You got to deal with fun features like quirks mode and worrying about transparent pngs. You had to use Flash if you wanted to emb…

> The idea that we were at some web standards pinnacle in 2008-2012 is crazy to me. The pinnacle is now. I don't think the point was that we were at a pinnacle in terms of standards quality, completeness, or user agent consistency. Rather I think the point – at least it for me – was that during those years it was more of a conversation, not Google choosing a direction and everyone else more or less forced to follow s…

At what time has there been better collaboration between browser vendors than right now? That is the reason that browsers are so well in sync with each other now.
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