The Hyperlink Grows Up: The Times Releases New Linking Features

Here’s how it works. In the story above, the base URL is: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html

If you wanted to link to a specific paragraph, you’d simply add a “#” and the number of the paragraph, e.g.: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html#p2

You can even go a step deeper and skip to a particular sentence, e.g.: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html#p2s2

And here’s where it really gets cool, though. If you want to highlight that section, you simply switch the p to an h. I generated the highlighted text below with the following link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html#h2s2

To simplify things, if you hit your shift key twice on a Times story, small icons appear next to every paragraph. Click on one of them and it’ll place the paragraph linked URL up in the address bar of your browser.