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snackbroken 5 days ago

> You still have to do some digging when you go back for the book.

There is widespread browser support for linking directly to text fragments[1] which makes it possible to link to arbitrary parts of documents even when the author hasn't marked up some nearby element with an id to target, like so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45047572#:~:text=You%20...

Unfortunately, Firefox provides no convenient way of creating such links, but Chromium has a "Copy link to highlight" context menu entry when you have text highlighted. Neither Firefox nor Chromium provide a convenient way to create a bookmark to a text fragment.

> As far as I can tell, the only way to move bookmarks between any of the major browsers involves the use of special software or network services.

Both Firefox and Chromium support importing/exporting bookmarks from/to "HTML" (really, Netscape bookmark file format[2]).

Both browsers also provide the means to organize bookmarks into folders, and Firefox lets you add arbitrary tags to them as well. Alas as you say, the only way is to spend time manually organizing them. Automatically suggesting folders/tags (preferring ones you already have created) seems like an ideal use case for LLMs or other NLP tools. Ideally browsers would offer an option to save a snapshot of the page together with the bookmark, that would guard against link rot and enable full text search. We have the technology, it's really only a matter of improving the UI and linking the two features together. Too bad hamstringing adblockers, gimping sites that rely on XSLT, and implementing WebBluetooth or whatever has higher priority.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F... [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

cpmsmith 4 days ago | parent [-]

Firefox's implementation of "Copy link to highlight" isn't enabled on stable yet, but can be enabled manually. The ticket to enable it is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1948471