this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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Now. Why am I wrong for Libre

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[โ€“] JackbyDev@programming.dev 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Nahhhh, you gotta think outside the box. You can tell people section 3, subsection 2, etc. even without pages. I'm addition, check this out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_element#Anchor Click that. See the little but at the end? #Anchor? We can already use URI fragments to link to specific sections.

"But JackbyDev, I'm not linking to a specific section of something in an outline, I need to link to a specific part of long form content, like a novel. I can only do that with pages."

That's a good point, but modern browsers have a way to deal with that too. This is where text fragments help: they allow the link author to have full control over what text to link to, without requiring any special markup in the target document. You can use #:~:text= to link to specific blocks of text.

~~Edit: Lemmy is reformatting that for some reason and makes it not work. Try copying and pasting the below for a working example.~~

~~https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/Fragment/Text_fragments#%3A%7E%3Atext=This+is+where+text+fragments+help%3A+they+allow+the+link+author+to+have+full+control+over+what+text+to+link+to%2C+without+requiring+any+special+markup+in+the+target+document.~~

Edit 2: Apparently Lemmy reformats links in preformat snips. Amazing. ๐Ÿซฉ Maybe slap this into the URL bar en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/Fragment/Text_fragments#:~:text=This%20is%20where%20text%20fragments%20help%3A%20they%20allow%20the%20link%20author%20to%20have%20full%20control%20over%20what%20text%20to%20link%20to%2C%20without%20requiring%20any%20special%20markup%20in%20the%20target%20document. after pasting https://developer.mozilla.org/ Nothing more frustrating that trying to show people a very cool and useful feature of browsers only for a different tool to just ruin it.

[โ€“] squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

I think you just proved my point.

None of that is nearly as simple and accessible to non-techy people as page numbers. A page number would also not have been scrabled by Lemmy.

(I of course do know about link anchors and all that, but it's just a hassle to use.)

[โ€“] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

No, that's a Lemmy bug. If it's screwing up URLs like that it could affect other URLs too. Not a bug of text fragments. Text fragments are still relatively new. Firefox only began supporting them last year. Annoyingly, to create then in Firefox you still need to go into about:config or use an extension. But still, the idea that we should favor paginated format just because you can say "page blah" when we have better ways is foolish. Saying "Search for the phrase 'blah blah blah'" works equally well without text fragments.

And yes, it's annoying that anchor links are too difficult to link to. But again, the idea that we should accept all the baggage of paginated formats just because anchors tend to be done incorrectly is foolish as well.

[โ€“] squaresinger@lemmy.world 0 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

The point was that text fragments, link fragments and even "search for the phrase X" are things that are brittle and require software support that's not necessarily a given. Having to enable experimental features of adding extensions are far too much hassle for the average user.

I honestly don't see what "baggage" paginated formats have. If you don't like pagination, turn it off in your PDF viewer. That's much easier to do than to get all software in your tool chain to work correctly with text fragments.

Not a bug of text fragments.

This is a pretty foolish statement. It's totally immaterial "who" is at fault if the feature doesn't work. You did not manage to send a working text fragment over Lemmy. Doesn't matter what in the chain screwed up.

I can tell you the page to turn to via a phone call or even in person. Try sending a text fragment by telling it to someone. Text fragments are a nice little feature but far too technical to adequately replace pagination in all circumstances.

[โ€“] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 4 hours ago

How often are you in the scenario that you you're on a phone call and need to tell someone where something is in a document versus communicating with them online where you can send a link though? Every work meeting I've been in for the past nearly a decade now has been through something like Teams, Slack, Zoom, etc. where I can send text.

Also PDF viewers are the baggage in the scenario. Everyone uses web browsers everyday. PDF viewers are the odd one out in the majority of people's "tool chains".