Here’s a somewhat recent browser feature I didn’t know about:
Text fragments link directly to specific text in a web page, without requiring the page author to add an ID. They use a special syntax in the URL fragment. This feature lets you create deep links to content that you don’t control and may not have IDs associated. It also makes sharing links more useful by directly pointing others to specific words. Browsers may differ in how they draw attention to the linked text—usually, the text is scrolled into view and highlighted with color.
It seems super interesting, but also quite laborious to build, and there may be differences in how browsers interpret the syntax: this fragment (which specifies only the start and end word) and this fragment (which points to the entire, URL-encoded text) should point to the same spot on the page, but Safari seems to recognize only the second one (perhaps it’s choking on punctuation), while Chromium and Waterfox parse both correctly.
Per those last two links, this all comes with an obvious limitation:
text in a document is less stable than document structure. If the text in the linked document is updated, the fragment no longer matches, and the browser navigates to the top of the page.
This is inevitable, and makes text fragments suitable only for linking to sites that offer true permanence, like Wikipedia or the Wayback Machine.
As useful as they can be, the effort required to build them makes text fragments less ideal for casual linking, but it would be cool to have a browser extension or a shortcut to automate the process (I haven’t checked if either exists).
Update: on the latest Safari, but also Chromium and Waterfox (and presumably their more commonly known relatives) you can right-click selected text and choose “Copy link with/to highlight” to produce a text-fragment link.