The difference is no 'href' tags. The 'tag' is automatically created based on the words in the paragraph, via Javascript, and decoded appropriately.
It is also slightly neat in that you can highlight a specific sentence (multiple sentences actually, see the little tutorial at the bottom).
I actually kind of like it, it would be a neat way to really highlight what you think is interesting in an article when sending someone a link. But doing it as a per site thing is crazy.. seems like it could be a good browser extension though. People who have it installed would instantly get a more functional linking experience. Imagine linking off to some documentation in a blog post for a coding problem, say to a Django documentation page, and when someone clicks the link they are not only taken to the specific part of the page that you are talking about, but the relevant stuff is actually highlighted. That'd be Neat (tm).
I thought about a plugin but then you are maintaining several and handling issues from readers who hits walls installed or uninstalling it...
My hope tis that this approach is equally unhelpful to everyone :)
Seriously, my hope is that if an approach like this is going to happen that we can keep the usage (syntax) consistent.
Further down the road I'd like the view to also show you what people in your network have highlighted, or on a more aggregate and subtle level, what everyone has...
Highlighting is neat; but concerning deep linking, the parent has a point: since the NYT controls the source, why not simply generate anchors for each paragraph?
The upside would be that there would be much less work needed to find edited paragraphs: a paragraph would be identified by its anchor and it could be changed completely, as long as the anchor is still there the link's fine.
This approach has certainly been envisioned: it would be interesting to know why it was put aside?
It seems like an easy solution - and it should be but the reality is that it is not.
There would have been deep-linking on the site years ago if it were not such a big undertaking. It had been on my own wish-list for many years but nothing something I decided to do my self actively until I met Kellan at OSCON in 2006(?) and he brought it up too.
Since then, a colleague of mine, Eitan and I started digging into the CMS side, as well as looking at some highly optimized code that outputs the article body. A combination of development time, risk, resources, and testing didn't justify the result - especially since we were trying this on our own time.
There more to it than that. But thats the main point.
The difference is no 'href' tags. The 'tag' is automatically created based on the words in the paragraph, via Javascript, and decoded appropriately.
It is also slightly neat in that you can highlight a specific sentence (multiple sentences actually, see the little tutorial at the bottom).
I actually kind of like it, it would be a neat way to really highlight what you think is interesting in an article when sending someone a link. But doing it as a per site thing is crazy.. seems like it could be a good browser extension though. People who have it installed would instantly get a more functional linking experience. Imagine linking off to some documentation in a blog post for a coding problem, say to a Django documentation page, and when someone clicks the link they are not only taken to the specific part of the page that you are talking about, but the relevant stuff is actually highlighted. That'd be Neat (tm).