Google pushes “text fragment links” with new Chrome extension

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  The result of a text fragment link. Note the highlighted text and the URL. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Google has been cooking up an extension to the URL standard called "Text Fragments." The new link style will allow you to link not just to a page but to specific text on a page, which will get scrolled to and highlighted automatically once the page loads. It's like an anchor link, but with highlighting and creatable by anyone.

The feature has actually been supported in Chrome since version 80, which hit the stable channel in February. Now a new extension from Google makes it easy to create this new link type, which will work for anyone else using Chrome on desktop OSes and Android. Google has proposed the idea to the W3C and hopes other browsers will adopt it, but even if they don't, the links are backward-compatible.

The syntax for this URL is pretty strange looking. After the URL, the magic is in the string "#:~:text=" and then whatever text you want to match. So a full link would look like this:

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