Glad to see google wasting no time on their new browser monopoly to screw up everyone else’s experience and push their own vision for the web. /s
Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page
241–250 of 332 posts
Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Aren't url fragment originally used for page position already? Like url.com/#title would scroll to the page the div with id "title"? That was the pre-SPA, traditional role of anchors... If you did any html between 1995-6 and 2005, you'd use it for that. Then, with AJAX/SPAs, # was used for state (pre-history API) -- and I'd assume many webpages are still left at that use.
Of course, page anchors are still in wide use, and not just on old pages. https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/README.md#inst...
Very wide use.
I just finished a large healthcare web site that uses page anchors.
Page anchors are recommended by one of the (many) federal web accessibility guidelines. This is so that people with limited motion or poor motor control, or visual impairments don’t have to scroll to find what they’re looking for on a page.
It’s also how the “Skip to content” links work, which is Accessibility 101.
Sorry, I’m not at work or on a computer so I can’t link to a reference.
Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't url fragment originally used for page position already? Like url.com/#title would scroll to the page the div with id "title"? In that case I don't feel like using url fragment for a word position is so much breaking it, it keeps the use of url fragment for info about page position, right?
Yes but this is about namespacing/syntax and likelihood of clashes. Normally, url fragments were intended to be used by page authors , making clashes impossible (page author controls both page and anchor syntax). Google are breaking this contract, but argue that the fact that they're using parameter-style syntax should not clash with author usage, because using parameter-style syntax is "an abuse" of the feature.
That is true of any URL, the user can decide to use it in ways you don't want. But that is also an intrinsic feature of the web. The best approach is to give users flexibility, but accept that websites may overide that behaviour.
Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page
#244Earlier 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…
I'm confused, at what point is a server involved? Fragments aren't sent to the server.
Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page
#245Technical 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…
Hmm, who provided the first popular JS framework that used fragments for navigation again? I think it was called "Angular".
You can go back even further. GWT (formerly Google Web Toolkit) uses the fragment to store navigation tokens. I actively maintain a GWT SPA in my day job.
Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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"
Aren't url fragment originally used for page position already? Like url.com/#title would scroll to the page the div with id "title"? In that case I don't feel like using url fragment for a word position is so much breaking it, it keeps the use of url fragment for info about page position, right?
Originally used with anchors IIRC. So, yes it breaks the original use, instead of scrolling to the anchor with the correct "name" it could/would scroll to a different text search point.
Why not "##" as a new URL fragment, or add a "scrollto" to the link tag that the browser can use?
I guess those were discussed, is there an RFC?
Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page
#247firefox has an extension that does similar
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pinpointer/
discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17556805
Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page
#248Very significant limitation: it only links to the first instance of the target text. What is the expected behavior if you highlight a second instance of some target text and try to create a link to it? It’s bad that the spec doesn’t discuss it. I can see this happening with short selections, like linking to a single word. Seems like this could use more thought.
I think this is being over thought a bit. Even in it's most primitive form, it could still be quite useful in practice. It's pretty easy to construct cases where it fails, but all such systems will fail either due to changes in content or changes in structure, and many will fail due to ambiguity as well. It's only really useful to compare how this might fare against other approaches. An example would be producing an…
Why not just use fragments? It's pretty easy to place a unique fragment at all places you care to link, except perhaps in the very nice case of reimplementing Ctrl+F, which would need JS anyway, so why not just expose an API call, like window.find[1]?
I really don't understand what this brings to the table, besides making people upset.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/find
Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page
#249I 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
Isn't it that Google don't have to care about breaking millions of websites but W3C do? At this point every web developer is used to bending to Google's will, W3C have similar power but need to get consensus first.
Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page
#250Because that is exactly what we have all been clamoring for. Gee thanks Google. Ok, that is more than a bit dismissive and I shouldn't be as cynical as I am about it but I switched to Firefox for a reason, this crap just keeps interfering. But oh wait, want to watch Youtube.tv in Firefox, oh so sorry you can't because it won't do video acceleration. I remember when you had to run Silverlight to watch Netflix too, tha…
For youtube watching, youtube-dl works nicely for much of youtube, and after you download the video, presumably your local player can make use of all your hardware acceleration that might be available.