Support deep links

[nichtich]

The issue of deep links has been brought up but not discussed yet in combination with multilinks. In short a deep link consists of

• a reference to a document (could be given as relative path or URI)
• a content locator to link into the document

The content locator could best be specified separated by # as URI Fragment. Note that at least (space), |, and % in URI Fragments must be escaped to allow splitting label and multiple links.

An example:

# Deep links in subtext
Links can contain content locators, given as URI Fragment. The syntax and semantic depends on document type.
For text such as subtext there is a specification:
& https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5147|https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5147.txt RFC 5147
This link references the second and third line of a text document:
& ./document.st#line=2,3 Deep Link

[gordonbrander]

If we do bring in something like this, my sense is that it should follow the scroll-to-text approach https://wicg.github.io/scroll-to-text-fragment/

[bburns]

Yeah scroll-to-text is good -

To add a fragment directive to a URL like https://example.com, a fragment must first be appended to the URL: https://example.com#:~:text=foo.
e.g. https://example.org/#test:~:text=foo will be parsed such that the fragment is the string "test" and the fragment directive is the string "text=foo".

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Could specify a search? eg #search="foo bar"

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GitHub lets you reference lines and line ranges -

https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/subtext/blob/dbbf178fe9f3480c052b461fcb1752829c9b7df9/parsers/subtext.py#L8

https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/subtext/blob/dbbf178fe9f3480c052b461fcb1752829c9b7df9/parsers/subtext.py#L12-L16

and github renders those as transclusions.

I kind of like "line" instead of "L", but referencing lines isn't as useful as text or search anyway, e.g. if you're using a "live" link instead of a "static" one.