One very nice standard feature of html/Web links is the ability to automatically scroll to a page location marked with a <a name=> anchor. One unfortunate limitation is that it's only possible to jump to part of the page where its creator was nice enough to include a <a name=> anchor.

I'd like to see an ability to include other means of location-specification after the # sign. Any browser that couldn't understand them would ignore them (treating them as # to a non-existent name) but browsers that supported them could supply extra functionality.

Two useful pseudo-anchors I can think of would be [#?s/text/] to search for and highlight the first occurrence of the specified text, and [#?img="filename"] to search and highlight the first image tag referencing the specified filename. Other pseudo-anchor formats could be used to allow selecting a particular cell in the first (or nth) table meeting specified criteria, etc.
-- supercat, Aug 07 2002

Apparently not everyone likes other people linking to their pages (witness some large sites that go out of their way to deter it).

I, for one, would welcome this. Though I'd probably only ever use it here.
-- DrCurry, Aug 07 2002


FYI the "Finding Browser" idea (see above) is basically your [#s/text/] idea. I like your extendible version better tho, so croissant from me.
-- krelnik, Oct 12 2002



random, halfbakery