Dr. Drang:
When I started seeing textshot tweets, especially Federico [Viticci]’s, I was struck by how similar they are to linked list-style blog posts
Today, Twitter seems like the natural place to do this sort of thing. Textshots work, but they’re clumsy. The extended tweets, however they’re implemented, will almost certainly be a better solution.
Although I don’t despise ugly textshots as much as Dr. Drang seems to, I will admit that when done “tastelessly” (as most are), they just look horrible in the timeline. (If you must, I recommend OneShot.)
Here’s hoping Twitter’s native solution is a true alternative to textshots.
Finally, toward the end of his post, Dr. Drang comments on the inability for bloggers to hyperlink to particular passages of text within blog posts:
Looking at quoting and linking in a broader sense, it seems odd that links are controlled more by the citee than the citer. In HTML, you cannot link to just any part of a web document, only to either the document as a whole or to particular spots that the document’s author has designated by including tags with id attributes.
As noted in my /nerd page, I use markdown-it-anchor to insert id attributes for section headings (h1, h2, h3, etc.).
That way, if I wanted to link to a particular portion of a post (like the above link to the “Technical” section of the /nerd page), I can do so.
And since markdown-it-anchor is taking care of the id attributes on the backend, I don’t have to clutter my Markdown source with HTML5 cruft.
Still, as Dr. Drang notes, there’s really no easy way to link to a particular paragraph without lots of id’s everywhere:
I’m sure that through JavaScript’s access to the DOM, web authors and publishers could include a script that allows direct linking to, for example, the nth paragraph of any article. That would allow more specific linking without forcing the author to scatter
idattributes throughout the documents. The script could also highlight the desired text, just like we do with textshots, to draw the reader’s attention. But this isn’t a universal solution because it would only work for documents that include such a script.
For what it’s worth, I just remembered that Dave Winer linked to an admirer who tackled this very thing, if you’re interested.