How to share a link for a specific phrase

This is very useful when you want to share a snippet of writing In contextwhich is a completely lost concept if you just take a screenshot with highlighting.

How does this work

This feature is made possible by a web standard called text fragments. It’s been built into browsers for years now; It’s just not the kind of feature that made a lot of headlines at the time.

This feature basically creates a URL that includes enough information for your browser to find the highlighted piece of text. If you copy the URL generated in this way and paste it into a document so you can study the link structure, you can see how this works.

In the simplest case, the URL will include the entire highlighted part. This works well for short segments, but for longer segments, the URL becomes very fast. When you link to longer pieces of text, the URL includes an indication of the beginning and end of the excerpt. In either case, the URL tells your browser not only which page to load, but also which part of the text to highlight. Your browser finds the text, highlights it, and navigates directly to it.

There are slight differences in how browsers handle this. For example, Safari highlights text in yellow, while Chrome seems to prefer purple in my tests. But since this URL structure is uniform across browsers, a link created in one browser works in every browser.

It should be noted that this feature does not work in all contexts. If the website you’re reading is protected by a paywall, and the person you’re sharing with doesn’t have access, they likely won’t be able to see the snippet you’re trying to share. The feature also doesn’t work inside PDF files, even when opened in your browser.

But sharing a piece of text is, in most cases, more useful than sharing a screenshot. Try this the next time you’re trying to win an online argument.