XPath bookmarks

The web doesn't have any good way of bookmarking any spot in a web page. With some help from the web page author, we can bookmark a specific anchor or node id in the page, but most particular spots are still not reachable for bookmarks. I just tossed up a little user script that makes any node in the page addressable by an XPath query bookmarkable. It's mostly for XPath power users, for now, but works well (and lets you load bookmarks using that technique, which you might have gotten from such people).

The source code (install from here) is extremely short:

var path, node, hash = decodeURIComponent( location.hash||'' );
if( (path = /^#xpath:(.+)/.exec( hash )) &&
    (node = $X( path[1] )) )
  node.scrollIntoView();

function $X( xpath ) {
  return document.evaluate( xpath, document, null, 0, null ).iterateNext();
}

Having installed that, you can load bookmarks like http://tibet.dharmakara.net/TibetABC.html#xpath:/html/body/h2[3], and get zoomed in to the right part of the page immediately (here, the part featuring how the Tibetan numbers are spelled, what they look like, and approximately how to pronounce them, for us westeners).