Did I reinvent the wheel? (JS plugin to link to page selection)

[iafan]

Spent quite some time looking for a JavaScript library that would allow me to select a part of a web page and send a link to that selection to someone else. I know there are scripts like AnchorJS that allow to deep-link sections and paragraphs, but didn't find any that would allow linking to a specific word, phrase or image.

So failing to find what I need, I wrote my own thing: https://github.com/iafan/LinkToSelection

Can't believe I'm the only one who thought about this — it seems to be super-useful for any documentation pages. Do you know of other implementations?

[tonyle]

Not many javascript stuff comes to mind, but you might find more implementations if you search for a specific problem you were trying to solve. The closing javascript thing that comes to mind is the letmegooglethatforyou site, an extreme way to point out the search button.....

From a personal point of view, Sometimes I would just email myself a link to a webpage if I wanted to view it later on mobile or vice versa.

In technical support over email, I used to send customers a link to a kb article or a pdf and a page number. I never had to go beyond something along the lines of, here is a link, you forgot to do step 4 or follow the instructions under the known resolution section.

From a bug reporting point of view, Most people would send a picture and send the dropbox link over slack/email. Dropbox has a little popup with the link to the image after taking a screenshot so it is very easy and fast.

It reminds me of Onenote and Evernote feature to copy snippets from a webpage, though I never tried to share the content.

While not directly similar, The code for searching for specific parts of a webpage seems similar to some web scraping solutions. Ie, here is a webpage, I want to scrape this selection for all similar pages,etc.

[iafan]

I know that the best available option in today's world is to make a screenshot of a selection to point to a specific point on a page, but heck, this seems to be an extreme waste of bytes when the only thing you want to do is to point someone to a specific word or a phrase...

The closest implementation that comes to my mind is GitHub's ability to select a line or a range of lines that would immediately update the hash and give you a permalink to the selection, e.g.: https://github.com/iafan/LinkToSelection/blob/master/lib/Lin... , and I think this is one of the small but handy features people love GitHub for, but it has a very specific use case and doesn't allow one to point to a range in the string, or just one character that, for example, is causing a problem.

[accordionclown]

related: > https://medium.com/the-bower/lets-please-use-hashtag-terms-t...

[iafan]

Thanks for sharing. This proposal makes every bit of sense, IMO. I wish selection sharing could also be a part of some cross-browser standard so that people wouldn't have to install anything on their sites. It's one of the things that would just work if it was implemented universally across major browsers.