How to Share a Link to a Specific Word

This is very useful when you want to share a piece of writing in situationsa concept that is completely lost if you just take a photo of the light.

How This Works

This is achieved by an online standard called Fragments of text. It has been built into browsers for years now; it’s not the kind of look that made a lot of headlines at the time.

This section creates a link that contains enough information for your browser to find part of the displayed text. If you copy the link created in this way and paste it into a document to learn how the link works, you can see how this works.

In the simplest case, the link will include the entire displayed field. This works fine for short snippets, but for longer paragraphs, the link is much faster. When linking long sections, the link includes the beginning and end of the section. In either case, the link tells your browser not only which page to open, but which part of the text to highlight. Your browser finds the words, highlights them, and jumps in with them.

There are subtle differences in how browsers handle this. Safari displays text in yellow, for example, while in my testing Chrome seems to prefer purple. But since this URL format is consistent across browsers, a link created in one browser will work on any browser.

It is worth noting that this does not work in all cases. If the website you’re reading is behind a paywall, and the person you’re sharing with doesn’t have access, they may not be able to see what you’re sharing. This feature also does not work inside PDF files, even if you open them in your browser.

But sharing a piece is, in most cases, more effective than sharing a photo. Try again the next time you try to win an argument online.