About LinkToSelection

Sometimes you want to share a link that points to a specific text on a page, or an image. This script, when plugged into a page, will do just that.

Upon selecting something on a page, you will see #sel:xxxxxxxxxxxx hash added to the page URL. Send the resulting link to someone else, and they will open the page with the same selection restored and scrolled into view.

Best Use Cases

Documentation: enabling selection sharing this on your documentation website will allow you to point others to specific phrases or words.

Reporting errors: your users can send you links to typos or other kinds of errors that they find on your website pages.

Demo

Try any of these links that point to a specific selected content on serge.io website:

• Link to a phrase
• Link to a section
• Link to an image

Usage

Just put the LinkToSelection.min.js file to an appropriate folder of your website, e.g. /static/js/vendor/ and add the following script to the bottom of your web pages (before the closing </body> tag):

<script src="/static/js/vendor/LinkToSelection.min.js"></script>

Browser compatibility

LinkToSelection was tested in:

• Desktop:
  • Chrome 48+
  • Firefox 44+
  • Edge 25+
  • Internet Explorer 11
• iOS:
  • Safari
  • Chrome
• Android:
  • Chrome
  • Firefox

Caveats

By their nature, links with encoded selection may not work if the other person who opens such a link sees a page with the different structure. This means that this script will work best on mostly static pages which are not password-protected and are not built on the fly from XHR requests.

The script may conflict with other scripts that use document.onselectionchange event handler or URL hash for their own purposes.