This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.

Bug 21761 - Suggestion new feature : reference highlights/underline etc : Problem : People suggest lots of web articles in their site or presentation, but it's very difficult and time consuming to extract what [...]
Summary: Suggestion new feature : reference highlights/underline etc : Problem : Peopl...
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Alias: None
Product: WHATWG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: Unsorted
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: contributor
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2013-04-22 01:14 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2013-04-23 05:33 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2013-04-22 01:14:19 UTC 
Specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-20110525/
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#top
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#top
Referrer: 

Comment:
Suggestion new feature : reference highlights/underline etc :

Problem : People suggest lots of web articles in their site or presentation,
but it's very difficult and time consuming to extract what section of the
referred articles presenter is referring, she doesn't have any tool to
highlight in others web pages.

Can there be some arguments be passed in the url from hyperlinks like 
"www.somearticle.org,reference: 'highlight:line30-line50,col:yellow"  (or may
be something better), so that reader can see the marked lines highlighted when
she visits the reference site. 

Some more features may also helpful: bold,underline etc

Regards
Chit

Posted from: 103.246.241.92
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.63 Safari/537.31
Comment 1 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2013-04-22 22:18:09 UTC 
Letting people style other people's pages is a security disaster, unfortunately.

Also, it's really easy for pages to change, which breaks this kind of thing really easily.

Having said that, there is a technology to kind of do this already, known as XPointer. My recommendation would be to look into that, and try to convince browser vendors to implement that.
Comment 2 Michael[tm] Smith 2013-04-23 05:33:21 UTC 
(In reply to comment #1)
> Having said that, there is a technology to kind of do this already, known as
> XPointer. My recommendation would be to look into that, and try to convince
> browser vendors to implement that.

Better yet, getting some vendor interest in "CSS Selectors as Fragment Identifiers" would be good:

  http://simonstl.com/articles/cssFragID.html