How to share links to particular phrases

Sometimes when you send someone a link, you're doing it simply because you want them to read a particular paragraph or sentence. Maybe you're helping a friend understand something and you know the exact information they need. Maybe you're trying to settle a dispute, and a particular paragraph proves beyond doubt that you're right. Or maybe a particular phrase made you laugh and you wanted to share it specifically.

You can, in these circumstances, highlight the relevant paragraph and take a screenshot. It's clunky though and the person you're sharing with can't read more if they're interested. Besides, there is a better solution.

Modern browsers, including Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, have a feature that most people ignore: copy link to highlight. And it's surprisingly easy to use.

In Chrome or Firefox, simply highlight some text, right-click it, then click Copy Link to Highlight. On Safari the feature is called Copy Highlighted Link, slightly different.

The feature works the same across all three browsers. A URL like this is copied to your clipboard. The link works like any other, but the browser will jump to the corresponding section and the selected words will be highlighted.

This is very practical when you want to share an extract of writing in context, a concept that is completely lost if you just take a screenshot with highlighting.

How it works

This functionality 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 headlines at the time.

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

In the simplest cases, the URL will include the entire highlighted part. This works well for short fragments, but for long passages the URL becomes quite fast. When you link to longer snippets of text, the URL includes a reference to the beginning and end of the snippet. Either way, the URL tells your browser not only which page to load, but also what part of the text should be highlighted. Your browser finds the text, highlights it, and jumps to it.

There are subtle differences in how browsers handle this. Safari highlights text in yellow, for example, whereas in my testing Chrome seemed to prefer purple. But since this URL structure is standardized across browsers, a link created in one browser works across browsers.

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

But sharing a snippet of text, in most cases, is much more useful than sharing a screenshot. Try it the next time you try to win an online argument.