Giving users another way to share
The internet is all about sharing content, and recently we got another powerful tool for helping us do just that. While historically you could only share links to full webpages, or to specific pre-defined “anchor” points within them, these new “text fragments” offered to let us create custom links that highlighted specific passages within a page itself. Now Chrome developers are working to bring us the logical next step: the ability to link to pictures and other media on a page in much the same way.
We first got to know text fragments when they appeared in Google Search results, pointing us right to where on a page the information we were looking for resided. It wasn’t long before we were creating links ourselves with the help of a handy Chrome extension, and then finally seeing that functionality get built right into the browser itself.
This new effort is trying to implement a similar system for pointing to media on a site — obviously, we can already share the URLs for specific images or videos, but this would allow users to the see them in the context of a larger webpage (via Chrome Story). Making this happen is a little bit more of a technical challenge than working with just text, and presents some interesting security concerns for devs to work around, but the utility of it seems obvious.
There’s no fancy name for this yet, and the documentation just describes it as “CSS selector fragment anchors” — really rolls off the tongue, huh? Hopefully we’ll be able to try it for ourselves soon in an upcoming Dev channel release.
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