I have a bone to pick with most of you, and it has to do with being able to link to specific parts of a page, which I know as deeplinks, and I hope most of you know it too, but this is apparently a weird, unknown quirk of the "old net", given that I keep having to describe it to colleagues/clients/friends/children/neighbour's dogs/etc. To me, it seems obvious, like a pi symbol for a link to a secret administration panel. To those of you already on the deeplink train, I salute you, my droogs. Those of you who aren't, why I oughtta.
It used to be, long ago, in the before times, when the internet was young and fresh faced, a page would have a few grainy images, and mostly text, because that was the style of the time. According to one's whims, one could send a link to a page to their compatriot, and reference an anchor element by its id attribute, and we would share the links with others via email, after they'd dial their goddamn ISP for internet, and they'd visit the link we sent, and their browser would "zip" right to the section at which we wanted their eyes to gander.
"Gaze ye upon yonder page, specifically the part where it says you're wrong and you suck"
This was good and beneficial. You could have a long page of text, click on a link to an internal anchor element, and just copy the URL which contained that id.
It would look something like:
http://example.com/ye_olde_directory.html#SectionWhereItSaysYouAreDumb
My chums. My friends. My digital co-citizens of the boiling flesh of the yog-sothothian internet.
In a small, crystalline way, deeplinking is glorious; it is lovely. We have something good, and pure, and so, so useful.
It is as a beautiful alpine flower: rare, yes, but when you encounter it, it is a moment of happiness, a point of clarity in an otherwise murky barren hilltop. Search within yourself, you know it to be true! And, just like the alpine flower iridescent against a mottled, grey and brown rocky outcropping, it would grasp at your attention. "Hey numbnuts! Get a load of this!" it beckons.
Where did those deeplinks go? I mean, yeah, I encounter it still (often in places like documentation, which is good! I like that! Keep doing that!), but it's more often the case that developers don't implement deeplinks than if they do! Can you link to a specific song section in spotify? The specific paragraph in that article where your buddy is proven wrong? Is it obvious how to do so? Can you link to a specific element in your settings page for your SPA? Can you link to a specific spot on your mapbox implementation, replete with whatever information you wish to present to someone else? Let your imagination flourish and blossom! The world wide web is your oyster!
This was a part of the promise of URLs - the promise of a specific thing on the web. The promise that you'd have something of note behind that abyssal, guttural combination of grunted alphanumerics, like summoning into the air a digital daemon through the ephemeral folds of space time, to laugh and gesture with malice to what we seek.
As the internet has matured into it's roiling fleshy mass of tentacles and unspeakable horrors and anguish, we now have copious media like video, pictures, and audio, unlike what we used to have. We should be able to do much more with our URLs as well. We should be able to reference very specific things. Why wouldn't a frame be something you can reference? Why wouldn't a pixel or set of pixels be something you could link to?
Well... maybe that's without reason.
But please, if you are a web developer you should be giving serious consideration to implementing deeplinking in some way in all your websites. Even if it's just as a callback to ages gone by, by adding ids to anchors in headers.
But in fact, with our new technologies, we should be able to deeplink to more elements than just anchor elements. I know, because I can implement this, typically, without too much hassle.
Oh, you're making a SPA? It doesn't matter, listen to the hash, and try to find the element with that id to scroll to. There's no excuse! Just do the thing!
You may be thinking this is some dork-ass loser thing that not many people will use, but you can use it when you are helping someone find something, fellow dork-ass loser! How many times have you had to describe with excruciating detail what element a person should click on to navigate to a specific section of a page? Imagine, instead, a way to send the user to the specific section, and, heck, maybe even highlighting the section.
Google maps has deeplinking, Wikipedia has deeplinking. Shouldn't you? Make it an ur-URL, give it a hash-crown, and let your pages blossom with the phenomenal cosmic power of deeplinks.
When we ask, like the fabled Peter Potamus, "Did you get that thing I sent you?", you should be able to say with a twinkle in your eyes: "yes".
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