Everything Can be a Link with Mozilla's window.getSelection() Method and the W3C DOM Range API

Aside from an altruistic desire to make the lives of people who may or may not visit your site or need to refer to your pages frequently a little bit easier, why go to all of the trouble of infusing your html with lots of named anchors? One of the aspects of the Web that makes it so amazing is the low barrier to authorship and the high likelihood that a given web visitor to your site is both a content consumer and provider rolled into one as compared to the incredibly low probability that someone reading a news paper is, for instance, a newspaper publisher.

Providing a high degree of “linking granularity” within pages on your site is in your own best interest, because it allows visitor-authors to comment on or react to specific portions of your pages and share links to exactly what sparked their interest/ire/curiosity/agreement with others. That translates into a higher quality of discourse with your readers.

Following this line of thought to it’s natural conclusion, it occurred to me that the ideal practice would be not merely to place anchors at regular intervals throughout the HTML source, but, above and beyond a default set of hard coded anchors, to provide a mechanism whereby visitors could make their own bookmarkable and shareable named anchors wherever they liked within my pages.