This is very useful when you want to share a piece of writing in contextA concept that is completely lost if you take a screenshot with only a highlight.
How does this work
This feature is made possible by a web standard called text fragments. It has been built into browsers for several years now; This is not the kind of feature that made a lot of headlines at the time.
This feature basically creates a URL that contains enough information for your browser to find the highlighted text portion. If you copy the URL created this way and paste it into the document so that you can study the structure of the link, you can see how it works.
In the simplest cases, the URL will include the entire highlighted portion. This works fine for short fragments, but for longer fragments, the URL is retrieved much faster. When you are linking long text fragments, the URL includes a reference to the beginning and end of the fragment. Either way, the URL tells your browser not only which page to load, but which 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. For example, Safari highlights text yellow, while Chrome prefers purple in my tests. But since this URL structure is standardized across all browsers, a link created in one browser works in every browser.
It’s worth noting that this feature doesn’t 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, they likely won’t be able to see the excerpt you’re trying to share. This feature also doesn’t work inside PDF files, even if you open them in your browser.
But in most cases sharing a snippet of text is much more useful than sharing a screenshot. Try this the next time you’re trying to win an argument online.
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