What exactly is the `#:~:text=` location hash in an URL?

Question

Today I noticed that some searches on Google gave me links to results with apparent instructions to highlight text.

Google brought me to What is the maximum size of

Answer 1

Scroll To Text Fragment

OK, with the help of a friend and at the same time via a comment from Berto99 I found it:

Apparently this is a feature called Scroll To Text Fragment. It is enabled by default since Chrome 80, but apparently not yet implemented in other browsers.

There are quite nice examples in the "W3C Community Group Draft Report". More good examples can be found on Wikipedia.

Highlighting the first appearance of a certain text

Just append #:~:text=<text> to the URL. The text search is not case-sensitive.

Example: https://example.com#:~:text=domain

Highlighting a whole section of text

You can use #:~:text=<first word>,<last word> to highlight a whole section of text.

Example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62161819/what-exactly-is-the-text-location-hash-in-an-url/62162093#:~:text=Apparently,Wikipedia

More advanced techniques

• Prefixing and suffixing like the example suggested in the repository for the suggestion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat#:~:text=Claws-,Like%20almost,the%20Felidae%2C,-cats texts as proposed don't seem to work for me (yet? I use Chrome 83).
• You can style the look of the highlighted text with the CSS :target and you can opt your website out so this feature does not work with it anymore.