Heck, a link from Idiri even works in Internet Explorer! And probably even Lynx.

Another challenge with word-index systems like “find” or certain applications of XPointer is that content is often more mutable than structure. Let’s say you point me to a typo by linking to a specific misspelled word… that link is dereferenced once I fix the typo. (Ooooh, a paradox! er…) Also, revisions or different versions of a document may change where a word is located, or the frequency of that word. While in a way this makes the word-indexed link more likely to resolve to some content, it also means that it may not point to the content intended.

I think there are benefits to both approaches, but the robustness still makes me prefer Idiri. Oh, that, and the fact that I wrote it.

I agree – this functionality should be part of the standard browsing experience. Especially with small screens becoming the norm – how many times have you linked to a document and said “search for XXXX”. This becomes increasingly important as the mobile web continues to accelerate.

In that vein, I had started an extension to add XPointer support to Firefox for HTML documents – then Rob turned me on to your extension. Anyway, FXPointer works in a very similar way but allows you to link to an arbitrary section of a document – even if there are no IDs in the doc, like some guilty W3C specs

Anyway, at the moment it only supports the element scheme (which is sufficient for “frozen” documents like specs), but I hope to continue to expand it to support the xpointer scheme one day.

It’s still very much in a ‘pre-Alpha’ state but check it out. Oh, also there are equivalent Opera UserJS that allow the same functionality (though less integrated).

Yeah, I think that it would be great to see “View Selection Source” in Opera, Safari, and IE, too… but honestly, since I made this extension, I’m not sure how much I’m going to use it anymore. I’m frankly surprised that Idiri’s functionality isn’t standard in browsers already (and I hope it will be).

I updated Idiri to fix some bugs that would make it fail silently and seemingly randomly… v1.1 is much more robust, and now it seems to work very consistently with a wide variety of documents, including Wikipedia and its kith and kin. Then I spent another hour on it for v1.2 to add the ability to select text, and have both the section link and the text selection copied to the clipboard (as text, not as markup). If you don’t select text, it just copies the section link, as before.

Writing extensions is a lot of fun. I’ll keep my eye on other standardista productivity features I can throw together.

Mind you, other browsers don’t even have ‘view selection source’ yet.