Links to Text Fragments

Alan blogged a really cool trick I didn't know about:

This ability thought suggests you can make a link to goes directly (i.e. what they used to call a “deep link”) to specific chunk of text in any web page.

I did a quick text a very manual way, I used the parameter Bracken shared, and manually created a scroll-to link in one of my posts. This required copying the text, running it through a tool that URLencodes text and adding the :~:text= on the end of my URL and adding the encoded text part.

Even better, he mentions you can do this in Chrome by highlighting text and right-clicking it. Sadly, I found this is not available by default in Firefox.

The aptly named Link to Text Fragment extension comes to the rescue here, which adds an item to Firefox's right click menu:

Here's the link it made:

https://cogdogblog.com/2025/01/links-to-text-fragments/#:~:text=this%20gets%20very%20interesting-%20it%E2%80%99s%20one%20thing%20to%20share%20a%20link%20to%20a%20resource%2C%20but%20why%20not%20link%20to%20maybe%20a%20key%20sentence%20in%20it%3F%20that%20surely%20has%20potential%20for%20educators!

It ain't pretty, but it works! Really cool stuff. I like that the browser literally highlights the text after you visit this link: