14 DAY TRIAL // A new feature that could soon be available in Chromium-powered browsers will allow users to link directly to specific words, sentences, or paragraphs on a particular page.
At this point, users can only link to entire webpages or sections as long as anchors are created, but with this new feature, they can generate links for pretty much any piece of text on a specific page.
A recent commit discovered by ChromeStory indicates that the new feature could be called Scroll to Text and is based on a GitHub project that provides a little more information about how this is going to work once it goes live in browsers powered by the Chromium engine.
“We propose encoding a text snippet in the URL fragment, prefixed with the targetText= string. Since text can contain characters invalid in a URL (e.g. spaces), the text must be percent encoded. For example, #targetText=My%20Heading would cause the first occurance of “My Heading” on the page to be selected as the indicated part of the document.”
A feature of all Chromium browsers
Technically, the link would include a reference to the text it points to, and to do this, the beginning and the end of the text would be part of the generated link.
At this point, the feature isn’t yet part of Google Chrome, not even of the Canary testing browser, but it should become available sometime very soon, especially as work on this already seems to be in a somewhat advanced stage.
Since the Chromium engine will be the one powering this feature, pretty much all browsers using it will offer such capabilities, including not only Google Chrome, but also the upcoming Microsoft Edge.
The default Windows 10 browser is migrating from EdgeHTML to Chromium, and a preview build of the refreshed application is expected in the coming months, possibly at the Build developer conference.