4 ms·

> I appreciate the fact that a paper will appear the same everywhere, that I can refer to "the top of page 7", etc. There are many great solutions to this prob

> I appreciate the fact that a paper will appear the same everywhere, that I can refer to "the top of page 7", etc. There are many great solutions to this problem, including ones that don't require Javascript at all. This website (https://gwern.net/silk-road https://gwern.net/silk-road) presents a really good example -- every header and sub-header is a clickable anchor. If more granularity is needed, on newer articles most of the paragraphs start with an italicized margin note -- though for technical writing, paragraph anchors might be better. The page also pays careful attention to print CSS and has a 'reader mode' to convert all links to footnotes when printed. Some websites will also preserve the text you select in a URL anchor, but more often than not this is just cumbersome. It also has a greater risk of not surviving changes to the webpage.

gwern 3y ago
Also intriguing as a solution, which is potentially much stabler across revisions (page numbers are unstable), is the text-anchor-fragment feature Chrome introduced a while back: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Text_fragments https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Text_fragments It's actually hit ~88% of the market https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_a_text_fragments https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_a_text_fragments but unfortunately, Firefox remains a holdout* and that's my browser, so I don't use it (although maybe I should just install https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/link-to-text-fragment/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/link-to-text-... and try it out - my existing method of making new anchors for annotation purposes is cumbersome). * Firefox officially is positive on it but no sign of any movement on it: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#scroll-to-text-fragment https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#scroll-to-tex... https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/194 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/194 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1753933 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1753933 https://wicg.github.io/scroll-to-text-fragment/ https://wicg.github.io/scroll-to-text-fragment/

gwern 3y ago

Also intriguing as a solution, which is potentially much stabler across revisions (page numbers are unstable), is the text-anchor-fragment feature Chrome introduced a while back: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Text_fragments https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Text_fragments It's actually hit ~88% of the market https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_a_text_fragments https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_a_text_fragments but unfortunately, Firefox remains a holdout* and that's my browser, so I don't use it (although maybe I should just install https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/link-to-text-fragment/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/link-to-text-... and try it out - my existing method of making new anchors for annotation purposes is cumbersome). * Firefox officially is positive on it but no sign of any movement on it: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#scroll-to-text-fragment https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#scroll-to-tex... https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/194 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/194 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1753933 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1753933 https://wicg.github.io/scroll-to-text-fragment/ https://wicg.github.io/scroll-to-text-fragment/