[webkit-dev] Feedback on Blink's text fragment directive proposal

[David Bokan]

+1 that this seems like a really nice fit for text fragments, even if it's
only to reuse the text-matching implementation.

By way of an update, Chrome is rolling out a "copy-link-to-text" context
menu item (a built-in version of the earlier discussed extension):
https://blog.google/products/chrome/more-helpful-chrome-throughout-your-workday

Incidentally, the link above shows where text-fragments can be helpful. The
page lists many features and doesn't provide convenient `id` anchors. With
a text fragment, I can link you to
https://blog.google/products/chrome/more-helpful-chrome-throughout-your-workday/#:~:text=Link%20to%20your%20highlighted%20text.
Unfortunately, I can't know what browser the recipient will open the link
with (guessing webkit-dev@ typically doesn't use Chrome :). To be truly
useful, we'd need these links to be understood by WebKit and Gecko as well.

I've come across text-fragment links where they'd be helpful to the user:
 - The link in "Musk has previously spoken about" on this Verge article
<https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402240/neuralink-august-2020-event-brain-machine-interface-working-demonstration#wsw3VB>
 - Citation 9 in this Wikipedia page
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_Cup_(greyhounds)#cite_ref-9>

With the built in functionality, I expect these links will become more
prevalent and seen by users of WebKit based browsers. We'll have more usage
numbers soon on how often these links are being generated from Chrome.

On Wed, Jun 9, 2021 at 12:37 PM Thomas Steiner <tomac at google.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 9, 2021 at 6:27 PM Megan Gardner <megan_gardner at apple.com>
> wrote:
>
>> We are store the explicite range/position information in the associated
>> note, and also use text matching as a fallback.
>>
>
> Thanks for responding! Any desire to adopt the Text Fragment syntax (
> https://web.dev/text-fragments/) for the (brilliant) Quick Notes feature?
>
> Note that we have enabled this feature in Chrome for iOS (
> https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-chrome/id535886823) by injecting a
> polyfill into the `WKWebView`. You can test it by opening this link
> https://blog.chromium.org/2019/12/chrome-80-content-indexing-es-modules.html#:~:text=ECMAScript%20Modules%20in%20Web%20Workers
> with Chrome.
>
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