Linking without Anchors

November 28, 2005 9:10 PM

Is there a way to deep-link to a specific paragraph in an html page that doesn't have anchor tags?

Often on the web, there is a page that has some salient/appropos paragraph amongst many others, without a convient anchor tag to isolate from the rest of the page. Is there some way to on-the-fly create a paragraph-specific-href in an external website?

posted by nomisxid to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Nope. Sorry.
posted by evariste at 9:19 PM on November 28, 2005

Some browsers (Mozilla/Firefox, at least) allow you to reference an ID as if it were an anchor. For example, this link will jump to the "Post a New Question" line of navigation links on this page.

Not sure about support in other browsers.
posted by Danelope at 9:20 PM on November 28, 2005

Best answer: PurpleSlurple will add links to each paragraph, if you're willing to go through an intermediary.
posted by revgeorge at 9:23 PM on November 28, 2005

Response by poster: RevGeorge gets the cookie for exact answer I was hoping for =)
posted by nomisxid at 9:25 PM on November 28, 2005

FWIW, Danelope's link worked the same for me in both IE and Firefox (jumping to the Post a New Question line).
posted by Chrysostom at 9:41 PM on November 28, 2005

Some browsers (Mozilla/Firefox, at least) allow you to reference an ID as if it were an anchor. For example, this link will jump to the "Post a New Question" line of navigation links on this page.

AAMOF, that's what the spec describes :). So, you can make use of that in Firefox, Safari, Opera and all other standards-respecting browsers (even IE ;) ).
posted by Handcoding at 6:42 AM on November 29, 2005

PurpleSlurple will (a) look like shite and (b) require you to run the existing page, which you probably have no rights to, through a converter, then save it somewhere else, which again you probably have no right to do even under U.S. fair use.

The answer is no, you can't, unless the original author used anchors (as I do promiscuously, but I'm unusual in that respect).
posted by joeclark at 9:11 AM on November 29, 2005

joeclark: you might not like how it looks, but your (b) is incorrect. You don't have to save it anywhere else and you aren't violating fair use. You can just run PS against an existing website and just use their website as a proxy which adds the links before forwarding the page to you like this.

In that link, the content is still at the w3 website, we just ask PS to modify it before sending it to us.
posted by freshgroundpepper at 10:29 AM on November 29, 2005

it's a matter of repurposing someone else's web page. This issue came up when people were scraping other people's pages to find out news and such.... i.e. having a perl script that would aggregate all the news pages into one big page...

I'm sure nobody is going to bust balls over this, but it is not technically legal.
posted by hatsix at 9:38 PM on November 29, 2005

To make Purple Slurple easier to use, try the Purple Slurple Bookmarklet. To use it, just drag the link to your bookmark toolbar and click on it when you're on a page you'd like to run through Purple Slurple.

Wikipedia is a good place to start for more information on bookmarklets.
posted by xulu at 8:27 PM on November 30, 2005