<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Gordon Brander</span> in "Slouching toward Xanadu: a roundup of block reference mechanisms https://t.co/CxSm0bZjHu" (<time class='dt-published'>02/24/2022 17:12:12</time>)</cite></small>

Discussion of some prior art leading up to Google's text fragment links.

This is rather slick. It would be interesting to parse the root URL and show more context of the original author's name, avatar, etc. as well.

And you could go a few feet farther if you added fragment support to the site, then the browser would also autoscroll to that part. Then you could add a confetti cannon to the system and have the page rain down confetti when more than three people have highlighted the same section!

Many in the IndieWeb have already prototyped this using some open web standards. It's embodied in the idea of media fragments and fragmentions, a portmanteau of the words fragment and Webmention.

A great example can be found at https://www.kartikprabhu.com/articles/marginalia

This reminds me that I need to kick my own server to fix the functionality on my main site and potentially add it to a few others.

They're not as wide spread certainly, but several people within the IndieWeb have been experimenting with annotations, and Webmention in conjunction with text fragments called fragmentions. In particular, Kartik Prabhu probably has one of the best examples and his site is able to take webmentions to fragments and show them in the margins in his site (much like Medium does).

In the time I've been using Webmentions, I've seen all of these sorts of structures using them. Of particular interest, I've seen some interesting experiments with Fragmentions that allow one to highlight and respond to even the smallest fragments of someone's website.

According to Kevin Marks, this is the GitHub Repo they've been using for creating this work: https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment#:~:text=the%20worst&text=a%20Google&text=serious%20breakage&text=behavior

This is a feature that's been implemented in most browsers for a while as fragmentions.

Hypothes.is has supported this sort of functionality for a few years now as well.

I'm curious how these different implementations differ?

But why not mix them together the way the IndieWeb has done?! A few people are using the new W3C recommendation spec for Webmention along with fragmentions to send a version of comments/marginalia/annotations to sites that accept them and have the ability to display them!

A good example of this is Kartik Prabhu's website which does this somewhat like Medium does. One can write their response to a sub-section of his post on their own website, and using Webmention (yes, there's a WordPress plugin for that: https://wordpress.org/plugins/webmention/ ) send him the response. It then shows up on his site as a quote bubble next to the appropriate section which can then be opened and viewed by future readers. Example: https://kartikprabhu.com/articles/marginalia For those interested, he's opensourced the code to help accomplish this: https://github.com/kartikprabhu/marginalia

While annotation systems have the ability to overlay one's site, there's certainly room for serious abuse as a result. (See an example at https://indieweb.org/annotation#Criticism) It would be nice if annotation systems were required to use something like webmentions (or older trackback/pingbacks) to indicate that a site had been mentioned elsewhere, this way, even if the publisher wasn't responsible for the resulting comments, they would be aware of possible attacks on their work/site/page.

Compare this with the fragmention: http://boffosocko.com/about/website-philosophy-structure/#I+try+to+follow