Chrome’s Deep Linking

Date

April 29, 2020

From

Issue #45

Chrome has made a change with value to content publishers. You can now create a bookmark that scrolls people down to the first appearance of a text fragment. So you can deep-link someone into a page of HTML, even if no bookmark has been inserted there.

my-page.html#:~:text=Squirrel%20Notes

You can even provide beginning and ending text, and Chrome will highlight the area in between.

I suspect this was championed by Google to improve their own search result pages so they can scroll you down to the snippet when clicking a result.

I think it’s a good feature, but there’s some concern that (1) it’s non-standard, and (2) it apparently opens up some very esoteric attack vectors.