Monday February 21st, 2011

The new HTML-based preference screens in Chrome have one, perhaps unintended, side effect: you can send a link to someone pointing to a particular preference screen. This is very handy for support desks who can now simply instruct the user to go to chrome://settings/advanced.

What is not yet possible (as far as I know) is to highlight a section of the preference page that deals with the user's question. Wouldn't it be great to be able to do this: chrome://settings/advanced#Web+Content (the fragment identifier is mine):

Optionally the fragment identifier could be preceded by e.g. ! to indicate that the section should be highlighted (if omitted the page will simply scroll to the section which is normal HTML behavior).

This idea could be extended to any site to improve customer support with a simple JS include. The fragment identifier can consist of human-readable titles (like the example above, in which case JS must translate the ID to a DOM element) or contain a CSS selector expression.