How to link to a certain part of a website?

Question

Say I am reading an article on the New York Times or VICE and I want to send a link to my brother. Is there a way to link to a specific part of the article or site, much in the same way that you can link to a specific point in a YouTube video ie. by appending a tag to the URL?

Is there another way of linking and referring to a specific point on a website?

Answer 1

You can link to any HTML element that has an id attribute set, by appending #id's_value to the end of the page's URL. This, of course, requires two things: 1) the specific point to which you want to link has an element with the id set; and 2) you search it in the page's source.

This is how a Wikipedia article's Contents links work, for instance, but I don't think it will work on the NY Times articles, since the entire article is made of paragraphs (<p>) that don't have the id attribute set.

On the other hand, there are apps like Citebite, that do exactly what you want.

Link directly to quotes in Web pages.
Paste a chunk of text and the URL of the page containing the text and in return get a link that opens directly to your selection and highlights it.

Answer 2

It's possible, for example, if the site uses HTML anchors. Then, you can use a link like http://nyt.com/2012/02/19/story#heading3.

This will automatically scroll the browser to the anchor named heading3.

For example, my answer's anchor URL is http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/24013/how-to-link-to-a-certain-part-of-a-website/24015#24015

If you can't find an anchor on the site, then you have to look at the HTML code (e.g. right click -> Inspect Element).