First, I'd say this is really more of an r/datacurator topic. > the power to link to relevant parts of the file without copy-pasting is what I'm after Generally, the standard for linking is support of a common [URI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier). Very few of the existing ones have the kind of granularity you're looking for, or maybe the problem is that you're not being very clear about what you *really* want yourself. For example, when you say you want "Quotes from ebooks" or "snippets in text files" all "without having to copy-paste", what does that mean? What *explicitly* will you be referencing such that, presumably, the fragment you're referring to could be updated whenever the file you're referencing changes? For something like a text file, for example, you cannot simply refer to a line number and/or character offset. > Webpages via normal links--if it's important I know I'd have to save it locally or rely on archive.org This is where a URN differs from a URL. Unfortunately, our web-centric world has seen fit to bury too much data behind `http` URLs. If you're going to go to the effort to hoard things properly, you should be using URNs as links everywhere from the get-go. For images/video/audio, again, you need to establish just what semantic fragment you're linking to. Most media players, for example, support some kind of playlist format (e.g., [M3U](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3U)), but whether or not that's terse enough for use as a "link" is for you to decide. So what it comes down to is extending URI schemes to support what you suggest, and then updating apps to handle them. As a developer, I'd say it'd be a bit time consuming, but not all that hard given existing software. Without a proper specification, though, you don't really have a starting point. Put a little leg work into it if you want to get this any farther than an abstract idea. fcf885861be94012b23f11d434d027308c810f883d290779721090b67d4cc4ca