I don't want to be the hater guy but am I missing something or isn't this just a glorified web highlighting service? (Including medium.com's own highlighting feature, or genius.com)

I root for any new attempt to do things in different ways but I don't like it when people try to spin things to make them look novel when they really aren't.

I wouldn't have been harsh if OP didn't invent a new ridiculous terminology as "Deep hyperlink" and call itself a "revolution".

Thank you for your feedback and sorry about using the word "revolution" :)

Probably, the article isn't good at explaining its feature. Highlighting itself has been in service since the start of the web but does the highlight has its unique regular URL?

You may have seen famous quotes from the web but they don't have links and the platform wants to solve the problem by providing a general URL scheme to make URLs more specific without any special web plugins or apps.

I don't like the terminology either but I wouldn't call it a highlighting service. I think with low and sporadic usage, it wouldn't amount to much more than highlighting, but if it actually became a standard thing, it would make for a decent improvement over current hyperlinks

Specifically in that it pushes for first-source references, if only by making hyperlinks more useful in that regard.

Its obviously derived from reading up on Xanadu, but its also probably not going far enough to be worth noting

Your service seems pretty useful in the context of e-books (which seems like your primary market based on your website) - I'm not sure why the medium article starts off with wikipedia as an example, seems like a weaker use case (just my opinion though, I may be wrong)

What happens when the content of the wikipedia article changes substantially - where will it lead to, or will it show a warning that the target content has changed?

seems interesting though

Thanks for good feedback. Wikipedia keeps versions on its content so that the URL will be still valid, leading to old version of the article that was what it was at the time of quote. The platform doesn't work on blogs where no versioned data is kept.

that seems like a reasonable solution. I'd like to be able to do this in slack conversations - I haven't used slack in a while, but the auto-generated descriptions were always a distraction, would be nice to select the text I want for the link preview.

I agree. So, I made link preview from buk.io platform the quote itself. Here is one example. Try to put it in slack, facebook or twitter to see how it looks. https://buk.io/@ea1149/5/9704~9850

I signed up and gave the wikipedia feature a try, it works, but is there a way to link to any website of my choosing, or is it limited to wikipedia/books?

Thank you for your trying out the service. We may be able to wrap around the other sites only if we know the details of the system e.g. how it keeps versions and so on. Otherwise, chrome plugin like tool is necessary. The goal of the platform is to use just web browser and web URL scheme so that plugin approach is in the back burner yet. Please try out searching for public domain books as well. We started the service with Wikipedia and Gutenberg project ebooks so that users may cite from then. Thank you again.

Old tech revamped? One could already do this by including the a tag id at the end of the linked URL. i.e. http://example.com/page.htm#thirdparagraph One could just insert <null id=thirdparagraph></null> where ever the third paragraph starts.

That is only applicable to pre-made tags, not to a random range or position, I believe.

Although, both of those are possible with the little-known (and little-implemented) XML Linking Language (XLink), a W3C standard. XLink allows one to define links on arbitrary tags, many-to-many links, links between external resources, and links to specific positions and ranges using XPath.

https://www.w3.org/TR/xlink11/

Not sure if that could be a good option to specify some content within a web document. First of all it is not a URL that you can normally use in web browser's address bar and share from social media. Secondly, not sure if it can specify arbitrary part of attribute value.

Thank you for sharing the information anyway and will take a look.

Best

aka: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion

The idea is similar. Deep Hyperlink is a regular URL and one of its application may be Transclusion at the end. The simplicity of using a regular web address which is permanent is what I believe is the first try of such kind. Transclusion is kind of proprietary implementation, I believe.