Sometimes we want to share a piece of a web page that explains or gives an answer to a topic we are discussing with another person. The most normal thing is that we take the link and pass it on, and at most say "read at X point that is between Y and Z part." If the recipient of the link wants, they can read the entire page, but there is a better way to do it: share highlighted text.
The trick is basically to use an option that Some web browsers are supported, but not all. For example, click this link. As you can see, or you will see if you open it in a compatible browser, in addition to opening the page it has also highlighted some text (the color depends on the browser that opens it), the one from the Core edition of Zorin OS 17. How can we get this? There are several ways, some easier than others.
Share highlighted text without extensions
Sharing highlighted text without extensions is not available in all browsers. Yeah It is a possibility in Chrome and Vivaldi, where you just have to select the desired text, right click on it and select the option "Copy link to highlighted text" or similar. If we then share the copied link, the result will be like the link in the previous paragraph.
Firefox does not support these types of links, so we better focus on other browsers, including Safari. As it is a function that the browser already includes, it is difficult to find extensions for others based on Chromium that do not include it by default. For example, Chrome Text Share It's supposed to do that, but it may not work.
The manual trick
You can always try to do it manually, but to do this you have to explain what the native options copy:
- The page link must remain as is. For example, if a link is
https://página.com/enlace.html
, that should stay that way. - The hash (#) must go after it, which is the reference to the ID.
- After the pad it has to go
:~:text=
, which will indicate that what follows is the text we want to highlight. - Behind the link, the pad and the above we have to put the text that we want to highlight:
- A piece of text as it is on the original page.
- If the text is very long, you can use the beginning of the text, a comma and the end of the text, which will select everything between what is before and after the comma.
- If we want to share a single word, I don't know, in case that happens, what we would have to do is use the beginning of the text, a hyphen, a comma, the word, comma, hyphen and what is behind the text, for example
%20hora%2C%20las-,actualizaciones,-se%20publican%20fuera
.
Special spaces and symbols
If you have looked at the previous text or the link in the example, you may have noticed that the spaces are not blank spaces. Instead, these tools replace the spaces with %20. It is likely that adding the text as is, with spaces included, takes us where we want, but no less likely that it will not work because it cuts the URL after the first space or a comma is not where it should.
The solution for this is not at all simple. The first thing is to know that the spaces are that %20, and then you have to check the unusual accent symbols, among which are the vowels with accents and other symbols. In this link From W3Schools you have a list with all or most of them.
Another option is to use a search engine and find a tool that modifies the URLs for us. For example, here You have a service that converts normal character strings to those understood by a URL. If your browser does not natively support sharing quotes, it is a good tool that simplifies the process of sharing it manually.
Of course, this only works for browsers that support this function. Others will only be able to access the link as if there were nothing behind it.