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I want to direct readers of a section of a long HTML page, the HTML I don't own. Just like to tell someone to read a book on page 3-4. But there is no "page numbers" in HTML world.

Wayne Li
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  • No, since the concept of pages makes no sense in "the html world" there are no page numbers. There are anchors which serve a similar purpose for navigation inside a html document, but those have to be specified explicitly. – arkascha Aug 02 '15 at 18:54
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    Just to be clear, there is no "id" information available because these are random public HTML pages. I need to bookmark a random range of paragraphs for my student to read by provide them an URL string, instead of having them to search from the top of very long HTML document. – Wayne Li Aug 02 '15 at 18:55
  • The only (crude) approach here I can see would be to visualized those documents inside your own pages. Since those remote pages can be accessed you can do with that content whatever you like. You can embed it (also parts of it) inside your own documents. Or you can simply display them inside a frame. That would allow you to scroll to a specific position inside the document by means of javascript. But as said: that is all crude. If the author of those documents did not add anchors for deep navigation, then what you want is not possible in a direct manner. – arkascha Aug 02 '15 at 18:58
  • Thanks. You suggestion of embedding citation into another page is similar to that of citebite.com, which requires another web server. I am thinking if there is a way of send an URL with a hash like this: http://www.myserver.com/mydocument.html#"first five words of referenced section"+"last five words of the the section". The reader of this URL will need some kind of plugins (Java?) which will search the original HTML page and put the reader at the beginning of the section. – Wayne Li Aug 02 '15 at 21:09
  • possible duplicate of [How to create permalinks on particular position for web pages?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29409402/how-to-create-permalinks-on-particular-position-for-web-pages) – unor Aug 02 '15 at 23:56
  • As said above: anchors like myserver.com/mydocument.html#"first work fine, but only if the author of the original article defined an anchor "first" inside the document. In that case no plugin or anything is requred. If you display the article in an own wrapper (be aware of legal issues!), then indeed you do need an "own" webserver where you can implement the wrapping logic. This is not a big deal though... – arkascha Aug 03 '15 at 04:34

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