January 20, 2004
Linking To Almost Anywhere In An HTML Page
For a while now, I've been pondering how to link to any part of any page on the web. Basically extending the URL syntax so that you can quote just a sentence of another page, or point people at a story which starts three-quarters of the way down a page.
Whilst it doesn't achieve this goal, this article explains how it's possible to link to "id" elements in the same way as "name" elements in <a>nchor tags.
I wasn't aware of that, and it expands the number of points at which you can link into any existing page. Not quite the universal linking and quoting that I'm after, but if you combine it with something like this service to add ids to an existing page then you can get close, in a kind-of roundabout fashion.
Posted by Adrian at January 20, 2004 03:11 PM | TrackBackThis blog post is on the personal blog of Adrian McEwen. If you want to explore the site a bit further, it might be worth having a look at the most recent entries or look through the archives or categories over on the left.
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The W3C's attempt to address this (no pun intended) is the XPointer spec. Considering how old it is, it hasn't been implemented very widely, but you might want to look into it.
Bob
Posted by: Bob DuCharme at January 20, 2004 04:56 PM