Multiple-Target Hyperlinks for the Masses

DukunSakti writes "For a long time people have talked about getting browser support for multilink feature. A multilink is a link that points to more than one targets. It's useful because many times a single target is not sufficient to describe a link. Wikipedia has numerous examples of acronyms and abbreviations that expand to more than one term. Well, I got sick of waiting, and so I wrote a plugin for the excellent Wiki application PmWiki that adds the multilink feature. This is fully supported under Mozilla Firefox, but only partially under Internet Explorer."

Comments

Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Anonymous Coward]

This is yet another Slashdot submission by an author whose creation doesn't even come close to living up to his hype....

In fact, it is seriously misleading. It's not a new innovation; it's just a DHTML popup menu, which many other people have already implemented, and far better. Better how? Well, DukunSakti writes:

This is fully supported under Mozilla Firefox, but only partially under Internet Explorer.

No, actually with his code it's not supported at all under Internet Explorer. All it does is set the "title" attribute in the <a ...> tag so that the user gets a useless tooltip that is a list of a bunch of URLs which cannot be copied or edited or clicked on, so doesn't support going to any of the links at all. Instead, clicking on the link goes to a page to edit the links in the Wiki. Far more people read wikis than edit them; this should not be what happens. Yes, you can then click through to them from the editing page, but we need a second page just to be a raw list of URLs? WTF? And even under Firefox, where the "multi-target hyperlink" feature supposedly works, you just get a popup list of raw URLs. How are you supposed to know what each of them is and which you should go to? That's why a normal, well-implemented menu has actual text, not just raw URLs.

Claiming that these are "multiple-target huperlinks for the masses," is quite inaccurate, considering that (unfortunately) 80%+ of people are still using Internet Explorer, and that for everyone else they are just presented as raw URLs. Essentially this makes this plugin completely useless. You can't ignore IE unless your wiki happens to be something like a Firefox support wiki. It's true that it's unfortunate that IE doesn't adhere to the web standards nearly as well as other browsers, but for now, the majority rules. There are plenty of web programmers who have found clever ways to do popup DHTML menus (which is all that this is) that actually work in both Firefox and IE; follow the link at the beginning of this post for a whole slew of them.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[ka9dgx]

Amen brother, someone mod this up!

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[MindStalker]

Not to mention the fact that the idea of a multilink really should be client side. A properly defined standard and a browser plugin would make this idea go much farther. And the links could properly downgrade if this was handled through a css property of some sort.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't ignore IE unless your wiki happens to be something like a Firefox support wiki.
You especially can't ignore IE if you're having trouble with Firefox! :) (That's what windows machines are for, really, downloading stuff when your Linux machine is offline...but I digress.)

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Pxtl]

Yeah, that was my reaction too: Oh - a drop down. Whee. I'm sure that a small list of wikizens love this news, but it's hardly a big mainstream thing. A better concept would be to work more in back-end approaches, like a more robust protocol than http - for example, URLs that include back-up sources for 404s, or swarmed p2p for websites. Then provide oss plug-ins for major browsers.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[serutan]

Scathing but useful critique. Sort of a moot point though, since the guy's site is already horked so nobody will be able to download the code anyway.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Loonacy]

Yes, because Firefox for Windows doesn't exist.
???

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[ccarson]

Is it just me or have long, elaborate, thought out first posts become more prevalent on slashdot lately? Is this shit rigged? Whatever happened to the one guy who waits for a new story to post and quickly posts a, "FP"?!?!? Don't get me wrong, I like reading a first post with well thought out ideas but I'm starting to believe that these first posts are inside jobs. Oh, and for the record, I'm a former tin foil hat brigade member.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[AKAImBatman]

No, actually with his code it's not supported at all under Internet Explorer. All it does is set the "title" attribute in the tag so that the user gets a useless tooltip that is a list of a bunch of URLs which cannot be copied or edited or clicked on, so doesn't support going to any of the links at all.

It doesn't even seem to work in Mozilla 1.7.5! (i.e. I get the same lame behavior.)

You'd think with the wealth of info out there, this fellow would have figured out how to insert a cross-browser hidden and collapsed DIV that he can then reanimate later. i.e. Something like this:

<div id="popup" style="display:hidden;"></div>
<a href="#" onClick="clickLink(event, 'http: //www.google.com,http: //www.yahoo.com');">Search Engine</a>
<script>
function clickLink(e, urls)
{
var popup = document.getElementById("popup");
var array = new Array();
var loc = 0;

if(!e) e = document.event; //IE support

while(urls.indexOf(',', loc) >= 0)
{
array[array.length] = urls.substring(loc, urls.indexOf(',', loc));
loc = urls.indexOf(',', loc) + 1;
}

for(var i=0; i<array.length; i++)
{
popup.innerHTML = "<div><a href="'+array[i]+'"></a></div>
}

popup.style.left = e.X+"px";
popup.style.top = e.Y+"px";
popup.display = "visible";
}
</script>

I haven't tried the code above so there may be a few bugs, but the idea should be clear enough. It's really not that hard of a thing to implement. :-/

P.S. Spaces inserted because Slashcode is trying to be "smart" by incorrectly autolinking the code.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Either the FP idiots are all asleep at the moment, or it is "rigged" (as if it mattered or something...). Whatever the cause, I welcome interesting first posts for a change.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[jrumney]

A better concept would be to work more in back-end approaches, like a more robust protocol than http - for example

What exactly is not robust about HTTP? Is it more prone to network problems than other protocols?

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[cytoman]

Become a paying subscriber to Slashdot, and you, too, will get the privilege of reading the stories before they are posted. Then, you can also have the luxury of sitting back and penning a well thought out "first post".

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[kalidasa]

This would work for cases where the different links provide the same info, but what about cases where the different links provide different info? I think you need a more robust linking model in xhtml to handle those cases.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[AKAImBatman]

Err... one bug fix:

popup.innerHTML = "";
for(var i=0; i<array.length; i++)
{
popup.innerHTML += "<div><a href="'+array[i]+'"></a></div>
}

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Anonymous Coward]

read the post once more and maybe you'll understand.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, my name is Pxtl and I don't understand network protocols.

(Hint, http can be used for p2p.)

You = teh dumbass.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[The Tyrant]

I think his point was that if you are visiting a firefox support wiki, there is a good chance your install of firefox is in some way in need of support, and thus you may well have to use IE to get to the support wiki :)

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[cytoman]

You are obviously not a Slashdot member... else you would know that even if you get a slashdot id, you can still post as AC by just checking the "post anonymously" checkbox.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[stonedonkey]

Is it just me or have long, elaborate, thought out first posts become more prevalent on slashdot lately? Is this shit rigged?

Agreed. As far as I know, it is physically impossible for an AC to type out, let alone formulate, a response of that length in sixty seconds (or less).

Something is definitely up. I've seen some borderline FPs lately, but this one takes the cake.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[stonedonkey]

Ah, never mind, I figured it out. Yay for not being able to delete my own posts. :(

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Anonymous Coward]

You fail it, dumb fuck.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[kaens]

Maybe the FPers finally got bored and the trend is dying out.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[neil.pearce]

The parent story we're talking about doesn't use JavaScript. It still works fine in my browser (I have JS disabled except for trusted sites thanks to the Mozilla NoScript plugin)

Yours... does nothing at all. Click on a link and nothing will happen. Goodbye to browsing a site using your "cross-browser" method.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[jusdisgi]

That's nearly the same thing I thought when I read that post. Except my thought was more along the lines of "Gee, this guy obviously knows dick about networking protocols, but wants to sound cool on /. by complaining about how the ignorant masses latched onto one that's no good. Isn't he supposed to be off someplace bitching about X?"

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[sumbry]

Well said. Ya know, this isn't complicated. When I first saw the headline, I figured multilink was something as simple as how you do selects and dropdown lists in HTML, e.g.

MLINK
OPTION="Site 1" VALUE="http://site1.com"
OPTION="Site 2" VALUE="http://site2.com" /MLINK

You could then basically extend the properties to be supported via JavaScript and CSS easily by using the same naming convention.

Once that's done, start by adding a plugin to one widely used browser and see if others like it and use it. If they do, then more and more people will jump onboard and help it spread.

But it doesn't have to be complicated! I can't stand that so many geeks have a tendency to over-engineer and overthink everything!

The icing on the cake though was RTFA and discovering that if you used IE you should switch to Firefox and while you're at it switch operating systems. Yes, I am going to throw away tons of my time just so that I can get multiple links in my browser.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Osty]

Yours... does nothing at all. Click on a link and nothing will happen. Goodbye to browsing a site using your "cross-browser" method.

That's fixable. You can simply set the href to a nice default page, and make sure the onClick method kills default click handling (I believe returning "false" will do that). That way, non-JS browsers get whatever the standard link action should be, and JS browsers will get a nice menu.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

MY question is why you would want to code something like this in the first place. It's a great idea on one level and on the second...... Yeah, I want nineteen windows of spam spawning when I accidentally click on a link. Really I do. But I know I would get them eventually if I installed something like this. So why make it standard? Why even try? If you can't explain what you're linking to, then perhaps it's not the technology that's the problem, and rather the author of whatever needs to be linked to four or five or five thousand different things.

ACCESSIBILITY ACCESSIBILITY ACCESSIBILITY

(Google's equivalent of Developers Developers Developers)

This is a solution on the liberal arts side rather than the tech side. Write up a list of links and explain each one if you think there's that much info out there required. Don't make ME pick something that doesn't suck from a bunch of unlabeled href's.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Cylix]

My only thoughts is he probably just wrote the API for the wiki rather then wait for someone else to write it. I'm fairly certain he wasn't intending to claim he made a new internet thingie(tm).

That's really the only way it doesn't sound absurd. Also, it's best to assume the slashdot text is misleading and/or incorrect. (I like slash, I pay for slash, but I know it has faults)

On a side note, there are tons of working dhtml pop up menus that do the job for both browsers and sometimes opera.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[AKAImBatman]

Here's a fully debugged version that degrades gracefully (for people like you) and supports more than 2% of the browsers out there:

<div id="popup" style="display:none; position: absolute; background: white;"></div>
<a href="http://www.yahoo.com" onMouseOver="hoverLink(event, 'http: //www.google.com,http: //www.yahoo.com');">Search Engine</a>
<script>
function hoverLink(e, urls)
{
var popup = document.getElementById("popup");
var array = new Array();
var loc = 0;

if(popup.style.display == "block") return;

if(!e) e = document.event; //IE support

while(urls.indexOf(',', loc) >= 0)
{
array[array.length] = urls.substring(loc, urls.indexOf(',', loc));
loc = urls.indexOf(',', loc) + 1;
}

if(loc != urls.length) array[array.length] = urls.substring(loc, urls.length);

popup.innerHTML = "";
for(var i=0; i<array.length; i++)
{
popup.innerHTML += "<div><a href='"+array[i]+"'>"+array[i]+"</a></div>";
}

popup.style.left = e.x+"px";
popup.style.top = e.y+"px";
popup.style.display = "block";
}

var makeInvisible = function(e) {
document.getElementById("popup").style.display = "none";
};

if(document.attachEvent) document.attachEvent("onclick", makeInvisible);
else document.addEventListener("click", makeInvisible, true);
</script>

As usual, watch for spaces in the URLs. Slashcode is a PITA.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[irtza]

Man did you botch that one... its supposed to be, I for one welcome our interesting first post leaders.

And first post idiots don't have the money to subscribe to slashdot to get in their first post!

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Charles W Griswold]

I, for one, welcome our new Insightful FP overlords.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[yintercept]

Not to mention the fact that the idea of a multilink really should be client side.

There are client side things that load multiple pages...frames and popups. For that matter, if you want to open two links, you can always right click and select "open in new window" or "add to favorites".

The primary use of multilink functionality will be to show seconary ads alongside primary ads.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Charles W Griswold]

Let me get this straight. To use it, you need to hover your mouse over the link. Then you get a tooltip with a list of URLs that you can click on. Only, it doesn't work on, like, 85% of the browsers out there. (Please, no IE vs. Firefox flame wars. That's not the point.)

And this guy has the audacity to claim that it's a useful alternative to just linking to all of the relevant URLs the way that normal people do (i.e. multiple plain vanilla html links). 'Scuse me if I don't leap onto this particular bandwagon; I think I'll keep doing it the old-fashioned way.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, your UID is about half of mine and you just now noticed the "Post Anonymously" checkbox?

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[neil.pearce]

Yes, that take's me to Yahoo when I click, but the post we're talking about displayed a list of sites to click.
I do not see a list of Yahoo/Google to click with yours?

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[neil.pearce]

Yeh, but the post we're talking about displays a list of sites to select from, regardless of whether you have JavaScript enabled or not

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[stonedonkey]

Nah, I just noticed that I sometimes speak before I think. :(

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Zone-MR]

Modded funny? Wtf?!

Here's another bugfix:

{
popup.innerHTML += "<div><a href="'+array[i]+'"></a></div> ";
}

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[a.d.trick]

There are plenty of web programmers who have found clever ways to do popup DHTML menus (which is all that this is)

Actually it's not really DHTML because there is no javascript. It relies completely on CSS, which is why it doesn't work in IE. While it doesn't work for 80% of the market, it does degrade very nicely for any standards compliant browsers whether or not they support javascript / css. I belive it would possible to hack support in with a .htc file served to IE.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[six]

A better concept would be to work more in back-end approaches, like a more robust protocol than http

the only real problem I can see with HTTP is the way SSL is handled ... which is none at all ... HTTPS is merely HTTP in a secure tunnel, and because of that you can't for example have different certificates for virtual hosts running on the same server:port

but I don't see how this affects the *robustness* of HTTP (which is by the way the task of TCP), and I really don't think a whole new protocol would be needed to address this problem, something like SMTP STARTTLS could just be added to the current spec ...

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[AKAImBatman]

I do not see a list of Yahoo/Google to click with yours?

And I don't see a list of sites with the original. ONLY FireFox 1.0.5 works with the original version. My version works with 98% of the browsership, plus adds a fallback for weird people like yourself who disable a very useful feature like JavaScript.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Anonymous Coward]

I got a fp this morning and I don't subscribe.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[dotgain]

Ooooh, careful. Soon he'll tell you he has twenty mod points on his other account, and he's going to bomb you to -5, Troll.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[DukunSakti]

Sadly, your lack of creativity has prevented you from seeing the benefits of this feature. This is not about a new concept. As a matter of fact, it is about an existing one that has been a subject of much debate and discussion for many years. Search for generalized multilink, xlink, or extended link if you care to really learn more about the subject. This is not about being compatible with a popular browser, but about providing the ability to easily create densely linked information contents with a wiki and an implementation of the multilink concept. A wiki is meant to be easily editable. This feature provides a simple markup to put a collection of addresses under a single term, in the context of a page. You collect addresses in a browser bookmark menu, don't you? When's the last time you actually follow a link from the forest of addresses that you have in your bookmark menu? Never? That's likely. The hierarchical menu is inadequate as the sole method for organizing links. Instead, this feature will allow you to have many bookmark collections in the context of a page. Therefore you will be able to have meaningful ways to organize the links that you find interesting. More than one way to represent interconnected knowledge, and in exactly the ways that you--the collector and consumer of that information--would want organized. Because you author the collections. The "mass" is not the people who stubbornly cling to a broken browser. But it includes everyone who are interested in using a simple tool and a good browser to organize information. This is in no way saying that the current implementation does not need to improve. The great thing is, it does not require magic to make it better. There *are* many existing coding techniques from which this feature can draw improvements, and perhaps even support for other browsers. Noone claims that this is the final answer in multilink implementations. What you need to do is rethink your employment arrangements and get out of your cube more often so that you could exercise some of your creative muscles more often and stop being shortsighted.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[remahl]

Uhm, yeah, that's why it is called Secure Sockets Layer.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[troon]

What's to stop a paying subscriber doing the "FP!!1" thing?

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[wpanderson]

So the "mass" is just a bunch of people who use one particular browser with one particular implementation of wiki software?

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[ckaminski]

And an AC to boot. I know subscribers get first crack at posting, but to see an AC toprated at +1, wow.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[ckaminski]

Or mirrors, without the abject explicit links we have now... If the browser detects a mirror isn't working, it cycles to the next link in the loop, ad infinitum until they all time-out or the content gets delivered.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[ckaminski]

Not sure if this would work, but in Apache, would the following work:

NameVirtualHost ipaddr:443

<virtualhost ipaddr:443>
ServerName www.website.com
<ssl config>
</ssl>
</virtualhost>

<virtualhost ipaddr:443>
ServerName www.website2.com
<ssl config>
</ssl>
</virtualhost>

I've only ever done IP based SSL, I've never gone to the trouble of trying to make it work with VHosts.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Shaper_pmp]

Exactly - even if multilinks ("fat links" in HCI) are a good idea (as opposed, for example, to a hideous confusing misfeature), this ain't it.

Multilinks should:

• Work in all current browsers. Oh well, that's it fucked right there.
• Degrade gracefully on older browsers. IE (no pun intended), the plain, unvarnished HTML link should default to a "disambiguation" page which just links to each of the possible fat link's destinations.
• Open all the destinations at the same time (otherwise it's not a fat link, just a menu).

So, what we have here is not a multilink. It is, in fact a javascript drop-down menu, which we've had since... ooooh... the late '90s at least.

About the only mildly "clever" bit of this is that he's written a plugin for a Wiki to generate them automatically. I've never written a plugin for PmWiki, but unless PmWiki-plugin-writing is superhumanly difficult it certainly doesn't warrant a front-page on Slashdot. Hell, it doesn't even warrant a submission.

Not so much "multi-target hyperlinks for the masses" as "a badly-coded dropdown menu generating plugin for an obscure Wiki".

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Anonymous Coward]

When's the last time you actually follow a link from the forest of addresses that you have in your bookmark menu? Never?

Or alternatively, 40-50 times a day. I bookmark those things for a reason. Doesn't everyone else?

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[aaronmcdaid]

That's wrong too.
It should be:

popup.innerHTML += '<div><a href="' + array[i] + '"></a></div>';

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Shaper_pmp]

Wow... just... wow.

I'm sorry about this, and I don't mean to be an arse, but you can argue hypertext theory and philosophy all day. The fact remains that this is neither insightful, interesting, new nor well-executed.

As you indicate in your post, fat (or multi-) linking is not a new idea.

"This is not about being compatible with a popular browser"

Hate to break it to you bud, but in web design, on the web, it is.

If you were doing something really revolutionary here the shoddy implementation would be cut some slack for the conceptual innovation, but what you've produced is fundamentally a drop-down menu.

These have been around as long as layers/divs and javascript - probably pushing ten years now. We've got them in javascript, cross-browser and even CSS-only incarnations.

In addition, you haven't even implemented fat links properly - true fat links should open all the pages they link to from a single click - this is the only thing that separates "multi-links" from "drop-down menus", and your version doesn't do it.

Now, it might be hard to write a plugin for PmWiki, but that's the only bit of (even potential) innovation here, and it's ridiculously self-aggrandising to submit it to Slashdot as any kind of news item.

You might well be owed some small amount of kudos for extending PmWiki's functionality, but your "solution" is so terribly executed (FFS, cross-browser menus aren't hard) and unprofessionally produced ("SWITCH TO Firefox NOW") that any tiny helpful advance is quite lost in the roaring mediocrity of the "feature".

In fact, I know of several rather more militant webmasters who'd probably rather string you up (for encouraging the use and dissemination of such terrible broken code) than pat you on the back for writing this Wiki plugin.

Basically, possibly apart from the Wiki back-end (which might well be hard, but which nobody's interested in), it's not innovative, interesting or elegant. Submitting such a non-event to a widely-read and volatile environment like Slashdot is just asking for people to beat on you for your presumption, especially when you present it like it's the Philosophers' Stone or something.

I'm assuming from your code that you're a beginner web-developer - if so I humbly apologise for the kicking you're getting, and suggest you gain a bit more experience before hyping your next hack. Hackers (and the Slashdot crowd) are generally very sensitive to over-hyping and BS - make sure it's at least interesting before you start telling people it's revolutionary.

HTH

If not, you should seriously consider reading up - may I suggest A List Apart, CSS Edge and Jakob Nielson's Alertbox. They'll save you a lot of embarrassment before going quite so public next time...

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Snaller]

Is it just me or have long, elaborate, thought out first posts become more prevalent on slashdot lately

Yeah all the idiot kids are on vacation ;)

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[Tibor the Hun]

How dare you insult someone with an # of 900660 !!!

So what if he banged up some code, got an account and thought he'd post it here?

oh yeah, this is sarcasm, for those who might be confused.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[DkHelmet]

Nope, SSL only works on a per IP basis. The problem is that the HTTP traffic is encrypted, so the webserver can't possibly know which host it's requesting from until it's decrypted. And since decyption settings are on a host/vhost basis, it's a chicken and egg problem.

There's supposed to be some advances for this in a RFC, but it's unsuppored in all browsers and web servers, IIRC.

Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses"

[ckaminski]

Right, forgot, the host header is in zee encrypted packet.. I knew it was something stupid like that...

Open Source Plug-in Perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Source code available maybe?

Re:Open Source Plug-in Perhaps?

[DukunSakti]

It is... The code is available at:

http://www.pmwiki.org/pmwiki/uploads/Cookbook/mlin k.php

Multiple first post

[huge]

Next: Slashdot featuring multiple first post.

Re:Multiple first post

[Anonymous Coward]

FIRST POST!

Re:Multiple first post

[roman_mir]

I think the above post should be moded as 'Informative' for the lack of a better description: 'Exemplifying'.

Re:Multiple first post

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it was a first second post - also known as reply..

Re:Multiple first post

[Tackhead]

> Next: Slashdot featuring multiple first post.

And for our next attraction, a little DHTML hack to make each Slashdot story pop up the URLs to all its duplicates!

Quoth the author:

It's useful because many times a single target is not sufficient to describe a link. Wikipedia has numerous examples of acronyms and abbreviations that expand to more than one term.

WTF? Am I getting cynical, or are these "multilinks" the least-useful thing I've ever seen?

To use the poster's example, OCP can for "Omni Consumer Products", but can also stand for "Oracle Certified Partner". If you're writing a review of the movie Robocop, and you can't be bothered to link to the page that defines it as "Omni Consumer Products", I probably don't want to read any further.

Context-sensitivity is a good thing.

Re:Multiple first post

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashwatch comes close.

Re:Multiple first post

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice to click on the link and have all of the sub-targets open in new tabs. Then it would truly be a "multi-link". This might require external browser support, though.

Re:Multiple first post

[lawpoop]

For most links, a single references is all that's needed. However, for a site like Wikipedia, a lot of links take you to a disambiguation page, which links to different entries for different meanings of a word.

Also, for a reference site like Wikipedia, where there are a lot of links sprinkled throughout an article, would it be nice to have links to Palace and Westminster included in the link to Palace of Westminster?

Re:Multiple first post

[MuuTuwon]

Come on, man, how can you not see the usefullness in this? Anytime you have a website that is serving the purpose of being a frontend to a big cross-linked database, like pretty much any kind of Wiki, you're going to run into keywords that can link to more then one thing. I agree that context sensativity is great, and a fitting technology for this kind of situtation. However, I think that it should be used to effect the order of displayed multiple links. So that you'd still get a little pop-up list, but the more relevent would be at the time, followed by all the others. Having the program just 'decide' which is most relevent without even showing anything else is putting too much in the hands of the machine, which will be wrong on quite a few occasions I'm sure. Not to mention that in my opinion, context sensitivity smart enough to make this kind of decision would be really hard to impliment on a website. Then again, maybe that's just my ignorence talking. Having put together a few "Wiki" style sites myself, I've used a feature like this to display multiple entries for a single linked keyword too. If I had known it was Slashdot frontpage material, I'd have submitted it back when I did it!

Re:Multiple first post

[Anonymous Coward]

> If I had known it was Slashdot frontpage material, I'd have submitted it back when I did it!

Hey, this is slashdot. There's always another chance...

Re:Multiple first post

[makomk]

It would be nice to click on the link and have all of the sub-targets open in new tabs. Then it would truly be a "multi-link". This might require external browser support, though.

From memory, I think either window.open() or document.open() - no idea which - with target="_newtab" should do roughly what you want, though I haven't tried it.

Re:Multiple first post

[moonbender]

Regarding the disambiguation pages, that is exactly the example the original poster referred to: on a Wikipedia page, linking to a disambiguation page is usually not the right thing, instead you want to link to the actual page relevant to the article. That is, on a page on chemistry, you might want to link to Atomic orbital while on a page on electronic music you might want to link to Orbital (band). In neither case you should link to Orbital, which is a disambiguation page, or "multi-link" to all of them because the band Orbital isn't really relevant in the context of chemistry. This is what the original poster refers to as context sensitivity.

Re:Multiple first post

[Mozk]

Almost anything is frontpage material. It doesn't even have to be news.

Re:Multiple first post

[dgatwood]

No, there's no real reason for this to exist except in things that most people would consider to be indices. For example, an index of abbreviations could use this. Even then, a better organization would be for the abbreviation to appear with various contextual variants below it, indented, with links to the pages where the term appears in that context.

The correct destination for a link should almost -always- be obvious from its context. In fact, a proper content organization system should inherently embed contextual information into the organization itself. In such a system, one can then locate the correct link destination by walking backwards up the tree until a matching target is found and be fairly certain that the nearest one in the filesystem tree will be the one most closely related to the page that is linking to it.

Just my $0.02.

Re:Multiple first post

[Snaller]

Then they should link better.

small time story

[SolusSD]

this sure is a small time story for a website like slashdot. can i post up little odd-end hacks i've created? ;)

Re:small time story

[phyruxus]

HA! 8^D HA!
Try Freshmeat!!

Re:small time story

[SolusSD]

I meant can i post them up as slashdot stories. sacasm intended.. as for the text in your reply... HA! 8^d ?? wtf?

Re:small time story

[Anonymous Coward]

I know.. I just wanted to use "HA! HA!" on slashdot. There's a cliche ballooning to gargantuan proportions on fark right now revolving around a picture of a guy that says "HA! HA!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HA!_HA!_guy

http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink =1578737&ok=true

Re:small time story

[RealityMogul]

8^d Wtf, are you trying to stick your tongue up your nose?

Re:small time story

[SolusSD]

ohh.. in that case... HA! HA!

Re:small time story

[Evil Butters]

This is posted when all of my submissions are automatically rejected??? But then again, I'm NOT a paid subscriber...

Re:small time story

[Stankatz]

"can i post up little odd-end hacks i've created?"

Yes, but you have to make it sound like a revolutionary new technology that's going the change the world overnight. Don't worry, the editors won't check it out first. It's all about the headlines.

Re:small time story

[Anonymous Coward]

that's timy for you

Re:small time story

[phyruxus]

sorry

I like the old style

[cybersaga]

I'd rather use the old way of linking multiple pages.

Re:I like the old style

[cached]

All of those [slashdot.org]s next to your links make your post look more like subliminal advertising than it should.

Re:I like the old style

[aristotle-dude]

How the hell do you create links like that? The "help" on slashdot is rather lacking.

Re:I like the old style

[wiredlogic]

All of those [slashdot.org]s next to your links make your post look more like subliminal advertising than it should.

This is obviously a shameless attempt by an astroturfer to draw more traffic to this "slashdot".

Re:I like the old style

[cybersaga]

It's just plain old HTML. Under the textbox when posting there's a little heading that says "Allowed HTML". Those are all the HTML tags you can use in a post.

Re:I like the old style

[theefer]

Actually it's more like explicit advertising and subliminal post content.

That's great

[roman_mir]

Now /. readers will be able to /. not just one website with a single click, but many websites also with a single click.

And BTW, be careful of Jeff Bezos coming right after you for this obvious - Single Click Amazon IP violation.

Re:That's great

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Now /. readers will be able to /. not just one website with a single click, but many websites also with a single click.

I believe the Slashdot way of handling multilinks is to repost the same story (called "dupes") and changing link targets in each "dupe"...

Re:That's great

[surprise_audit]

Yeah, but the Amazon patent is for single-click-buying, not single-click-nuking-from-orbit...

Re:That's great

[Excelsior]

repost the same story (called "dupes")

No, no. That is so 90's. These days we call them "zonks".

Sweet

[broothal]

When I read the intro text I thought "this is stupid", but try the demo. It's actually pretty cool. I predict this to become standard very soon.

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Very soon? How soon? Like a month? A year? Five years? Ten? And by "standard" do you mean the norm, or a documented standard? Or are you just another idiot slashdotter sounding off?

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

From "stupid" to "standard" in a mouse click? Do you work for Microsoft?

List o Links

[timle]

How bout a comma seperated list of hyper links - really multi-links bah. and really use the presentation layer to support this - thats a good idea.

Re:List o Links

[masklinn]

unless you fit them all in the "href" field, preventing regular browsers from using any of them.

Multiple-Target Hyperlinks for the Spammers

[intmainvoid]

From the comments above it looks like this doesn't really do what it say, but just as well. It'd take spammers/porn site webmasters about 2 seconds to have us opening 500 windows with a single misplaced click.

Re:Multiple-Target Hyperlinks for the Spammers

[venicebeach]

Yeah, it doesn't open up more than one URL with a single click. It shows a menu of URLs with a mouseover.

In fact, one of the annoying things about it is that you can't simply click on the link. You have to hover over it, then mouse down to the link you want, then click. If you try and just click on the link you end up clicking on some useless menu title. It would be nicer if you could use it as a regular link - click on it once and it takes you to the default URL - but hover and get more options.

Re:Multiple-Target Hyperlinks for the Spammers

[ultranova]

It would be nicer if you could use it as a regular link - click on it once and it takes you to the default URL - but hover and get more options.

Yeah, because nothing is more fun as hovering over every link just to see if it expands into a list.

What's wrong with just listing the links sequentially ? All these expanding lists only make the UI of the site harder to use, since they make it more difficult to see the structure of the page at a glance. "Feed me, Seymour" shout my eyes, and they want to take big meals, not small bites as my brains try to figure out where the content I want is hidden.

I hate pages designed by people with too much artistic and too little common sense.

It doesn't have to be that complicated

[Kainaw]

While this is cute, I wrote a highly similar script in JavaScript. It takes one button and expands it out (like flower petals) into multiple buttons. http://shaunwagner.com/projects/js/flowerButton.ht ml

As you can see fron the JavaScript, it is actually a rather simple task to position the buttons in a circle or in a simple box as this article's example does.

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[boneshintai]

Your moving navigation bar is really, really distracting.

href="javascript:..." is almost universally a bad idea.

Other than that, that's a really neat idea. How well does it play with JS-disabled browsers?

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[cybersaga]

While this is cute, I wrote a highly similar script in JavaScript. It takes one button and expands it out (like flower petals) into multiple buttons.

While looking cool, if someone has JavaScript disabled, all those fancy links become unreachable and unusable.

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[schon]

OK, interesting - but how do you get it to go back to normal?

Here's what happened to me on your site:

You click on it, read the links, then decide that you don't want to go to any of them. Now you have a bunch of text (that you don't want) obscuring part of the page and making it impossible to read. The only way I could think of to get rid of them was to click on another "multi-link" (which means just obscuring a different part of the page), or to reload (which wastes bandwidth and time.)

Even worse - if someone decides to open the new link in a new tab or window, the link doesn't go back to normal - it sticks around (again) obscuring the text on the site.

Considering that people can't know what's in the hidden part of the link before they click on it, it seems a little silly to me to prevent them from undoing the menu when they go to find out.

Perhaps a better idea would be to display the links when the mouse is hovering over the link, instead of when they click on it? (And you could probably do that with simple CSS, rather than using Javascript.)

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[Rocknrico]

Very nice work. Thanks for sharing.

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

You click it again... and it goes away.
Which took like all of a second to figure out.

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[(A)*(B)!0_-]

" OK, interesting - but how do you get it to go back to normal?"

The text links went away for me when I clicked in the center of the ring.

"Considering that people can't know what's in the hidden part of the link before they click on it, it seems a little silly to me to prevent them from undoing the menu when they go to find out."

The text links went away for me when I clicked in the center of the ring.

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, interesting - but how do you get it to go back to normal?

Click it again, dipshit.

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[roman_mir]

Too many clicks. I actually would have preferred if the 'petals' on your links came up on rollover and disappeared once the mouse is out of the circumference of the popup links. Or did it become too complicated to implement for you? But 'too complex to implement' is not excuse if you are bothering in the first place to come up with something that will supposedely improve user experience, no?

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[eln]

If he had used href='#' and onClick instead, it would simply be an issue of doing onMouseOver instead. However, I don't know that that's a very good idea, because personally I can't stand it when random things pop up and obscure parts of the screen just because I accidentally moved my mouse over them. To each his own I guess.

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[kharchenko]

Pretty nice. Although, from what I remember Alias Wavefront pattented such "conext menus" that expand around the mouse button in their Maya software :/

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Reader:

I am impressed with your innovative use of javascript, however I disagree an aspect of the implimentation.

Seeing as I myself am inept and incapable of creating an adaptation that I perfer, I will merely berate you for not doing so.

I expect you will have a revised version by the morning.

Signed,

Comic Book Guy

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

Would be funny if it was applicable in this case, in which it is most surely not. The guy breathes javascript.

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[tootlemonde]

It takes one button and expands it out (like flower petals) into multiple buttons.

You seem to have independently discovered or reinvented the pie menu, also known as the circle menu or radial context menu.

There are assorted demos here

Despite some evidence that pie menus are easier to use than more common schemes, they've never caught on. It might be because they are not as compact as other types and so page designers trade off some usability to make better use of screen space. Also, they don't scale well to a large number of options.

Still, you might think that with the human hand a a model of a radial selection device, pie menus would be more popular. However, even in the physical world, levers, switches, sliders and rows of buttons are more common than radial devices. The same objections for UI design on the screen seem to apply to physical devices.

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[feronti]

Damn, but the Desktop CSS scheme on that site is scary. Cool, but it takes a seriously disturbed mind to do all that with CSS and Javascript:)

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[Blakey Rat]

The most useful pie menu I've ever seen was in the Xbox version of Counter-Strike. You could very quickly and easily buy your equipment in a flash... the 'slices' of the pie were all labelled, and the control device (the analog stick) already moved in a circular fashion to start with.

Neverwinter Nights on the PC, however, has the worst pie menu implementation I've ever seen. The 'slices' are only labelled with obscure icons, and the mouse isn't really suited for moving in a circular fashion, at least not in the same way an analog stick is.

So like anything, it can be done well, and it can suck.

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[Kainaw]

Thanks. I just bookmarked all the links as it is too late to look at them now. I searched for this thing before writing it, but I didn't know what it was called. So, I just wrote my simplistic half-assed version.

A good example of these menus (where I stole it from) is the Sims games.

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[Thaelon]

Neat! You pretty much pwned the guy in the article. Especially with the text version.

However, being a User Interface Nazi I have to add some constructive critcism. The button itself gives no indication that it is a clickable button. It just looks like a radio button. The text version looked a little hackish but it was pretty apparent what might happen if you clicked on one of the text links after it exploded into them.

Perhaps a better version would be to combine the two: text immediately followed by the icon (a single anchor) and make it look like something that would expand or something if that's possible. That way the user is informed beforehand that this is not a normal hyperlink. User Interfaces should not surprise the user!

The windows move icon with some extra arrows or some slight modification would do nicely I think.

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

That's cool (and as someone else has already said, much cooler than what's in the article), but I must ask if you were aware of the flower navigation on georgeharrison.com or if it was just coincidental . . .

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes... NWN was a pretty good game, but the menus were pretty hard to use. In particular trying to find a spell you want to cast - under 'Spells' -> 'Metamagic' - > 'Maximised' -> 'Sorcerer' -> 'Level III' -> 'Fireball'.

The shortcut bar was essential, but even that wasn't great - not enough space on the first page, and trying to hit something like Ctrl-F6 for an item on the second page was hopeless.

Re:It doesn't have to be that complicated

[Kainaw]

were aware of the flower navigation on georgeharrison.com or if it was just coincidental

It was a coincidence, but I figure there are only a few degrees of separation. Harrison obviously drew his inspiration for the flower design from the Hindu religion. I drew my inspiration for the design from the Sims games, but had no name for it. I study religions extensively, so any arrangement like that reminds me of a Hindu flower - hence, flower buttons.

Amazon

[LodCrappo]

already patended this back when they patented everything else..

Re:GO Firefox

[WesG]

*sigh*...yet another example of someone who types before he thinks.

Misleading

[alfrin]

The article Title + Summary make it seem like this guy has used some new sort of mark up previously untapped. Not only has it been done but its just DHTML built into a Wiki like context. Come on, this isn't a site for little nifty hacks, its for news.

Re:Misleading

[DaveJay]

I agree. I've been waiting for years for a standard to be developed wherein I could drop this markup in:



and the browser would either show a selection menu of some kind on click or pop multiple tabs (newer compatible browsers) or ignore all except the last href/alt pair (older incompatible browsers). No javascript, no dhtml, just:

x
----
xxx
yyy
zzz

alas, that would be useful, so it will never happen. heh.

Re:Misleading

[griffjon]

OMFG he should totally patent this and license it to Amazon. Imagine, One-click-to-buy-it-all! and he can require webmasters who want to use any multi-linking type technology to pay fees, just like UNISYS did for GIFs. Man, UNISYS is such a great company, loved by all, making money hand over fist on their GIF patents.

Re:Misleading

[DaveJay]

Duh, should have previewed...

the markup should have showed a standard 'a' tag, with one alt attribute and multiple href attributes.

although technically it should have been one alt, one href, and a slew of althref attributes (that older browsers would just ignore).

Re:Misleading

[lxs]

Come on, this isn't a site for little nifty hacks, its for news.

It is? Now that's news to me. I always thought that the "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" bit was meant ironically. Perhaps someone should inform the editors.

Re:Misleading

[ari_j]

this isn't a site for little nifty hacks

Fortunately, this hack isn't even nifty, so you haven't really disqualified it. How about: This isn't a site for boring posers, it's a site for stuff that matters.

Re:Misleading

[sdpuppy]

Actually, your example should have been like this:

x

----

xxx

yyy

zzz

zzz

yyy

or you'll never get past the snake (if you're feeling adventurous :-)

Well, it's the funniest thing I could think up before the number of posts past 751....

(Why are so many /. posts nowadays so serious? There used to be a lot more humour here!)

...you are in a twisty maze of passageways, all different

no I'm not, I'm the same as everyone else

Re:Misleading

[chuckfucter]

--OFFTOPIC-- DAVEJAY, i want to thank you for your fpd1500 linux how to. I found it through your comment on slashdot, also reinforcing the points that you amde in that comment.

Security Risk?

[pablonhd]

Would this not pose a big security risk? Couldn't this mean that it is possible that one link would open a number of useful targets and then have a malicious target buried among them? Or would this mean that every link could carry advertisement link with every click?

Not to be negative, but...

[deemaunik]

Does anyone else see the opportunity for abuse with this? Such as the dreaded autopopup when you close a window, and endless loops of crap?

Re:Not to be negative, but...

[Unanimous Cowturd]

"Does anyone else see the opportunity for abuse with this?" - and how. Especially if it has graphics. Put on an animated 'Boobies' tag, and you can guarantee which of the multiple links get clicked on. Sort of the operating principle behind Fark dot com... I can see the criminal element drooling as they think of the possibilites: 1. Create a phishing site; 2. Target the small (but growing!) market segment that has a) Firefox, and b) enough interest in PMWiki sites to install the plugin; 3. Prof-- er, no. Wait.

Re:GO Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean switching to the bugfix release of the bugfix release (i.e. FF 1.0.6)? Yeah, sure.

Not IE compatible? Congrats, 80% ignores you.

[jleq]

I may not like Internet Explorer, but it's just plain imprudent to *not* support it.

My multilink plugin code adds full support for this feature to Firefox browsers, but only partially to any recent versions of Internet Explorer due to its CSS implementation shortcomings (full support may be upcoming if there is any users demand)

Uhhh... try 80% of all internet users? We're not going to get the average 'net user to switch to Firefox by pissing him/her off with incompatibilities. What happens when a media item that I want to watch is only available for realplayer? I don't watch it.

Re:Not IE compatible? Congrats, 80% ignores you.

[Overzeetop]

We're not going to get the average 'net user to switch to Firefox by pissing him/her off with incompatibilities.

I don't know, that seems to be the response of microsoft-centric web designers, and it's worked pretty well for them.

Re:Not IE compatible? Congrats, 80% ignores you.

[A_Known_Coward]

Honestly, the only way IE will come up to standards is if web developers stop intentionally writing work arounds for it. I mean, what incentive is there for standards adherance when your incompatibility with standards is the status quo?

Re:Not IE compatible? Congrats, 80% ignores you.

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was 80 % of computers on desktops, how do you know it is 80% of internet users?

Re:Not IE compatible? Congrats, 80% ignores you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I won't use anything without cross-browser/platform support, but ignoring IE seems asinine.

You should be able to do something very similar using overLIB and just putting URLs in the hover menu. Hell, by doing that, you can even give them titles instead of just showing the raw URL! It would probably take some tweaking to get it to work just right, though (for example, the out-of-box behaivior would make it impossible for links to be clicked on, since the hover boxes follow the mouse).

I'm sure there are other solutions out there too, and you could probably whip one together using DHTML examples...

Re:Not IE compatible? Congrats, 80% ignores you.

[dustmite]

Thank you. Honestly, are we supposed to reward Microsoft for making a non-standards-compliant browser by all doing extra work to make websites work with IE, basically spending our own time and money deliberately helping IE become even further entrenched? That's crazy. I say fsck it - code to standards, let it break on IE, and let MS either fix their browser or fall behind. If that means we "force" customers to use a standards-compliant browser to use the Web, well, that doesn't sound like such a bad thing to me. If enough major websites did this, MS would very quickly come round, and the 'standards compability patch' would be downloadable from MS in no time flat.

Open standards are important, without them, there is no fair competition and you are stuck with single-vendor lock-in and corresponding overpriced solutions. If we believe in the purpose of standards, we must adhere to this principle. This doesn't necessarily even mean "locking your customers out" for commercial websites - it's quite possible to design a standards-compilant website that renders in both IE and Firefox.

Re:Not IE compatible? Congrats, 80% ignores you.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the first intelligent comment that I've read so far... Too many people think that a solution must be complex to be worth anything. And a lot of the time the majority of complex code are simply there to maintain compatibility or to work around existing idiosyncracies. Why not do it differently this time, and write simple solutions that can immediately be tested and used, and bypass the baggage that we call 80% compatibility but does nothing more than to continue support for the monopoly?

Re:Not IE compatible? Congrats, 80% ignores you.

[jleq]

You have a good point that I agree with to some extent. However, why is it fair to punish the end user because of the shortcomings of their browser? Many people aren't informed enough to even have the opportunity to switch to Firefox. They'll just think "ah, that website sucks. moving on". Which, of course, is not good for the website.

I do believe that Firefox will slowly but surely catch up to IE in terms of market share. At that point, once more and more people are informed, Microsoft's only choice will be to develop something better (i.e. standards compliant and secure) in order to attempt to regain what they've lost. I'm hoping that competition will once again drive the browser industry to develop new things that will benefit us all.

Re:Not IE compatible? Congrats, 80% ignores you.

[Anonymous Coward]

So then why not inform the user and say, hey, this web site may not look cool to you, but that's because of your browser. Switch to Firefox, and stop clinging to an inferior product just because 80% of the market is using it.

Re:Not IE compatible? Congrats, 80% ignores you.

[tuxedobob]

Do you think that IE-using 80% cares about this feature? Probably not. If they did, they'd get Firefox.

General rant

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, this is entirely OT but it must be said.

FFS SLASHDOT if you're going to link to stuff host your own mirrored copy! I'm sick of seeing awesome links on here that essentially get DDOSed because you link to them.

I mean honestly, would it kill you to use up an extra few megs of bandwidth a month even to host a text copy!?

Re:General rant

[cryptoz]

For crying out loud, just use freaking mirrordot. Or search for the article on the net yourself; it's not like it'd be all that difficult to find!

Very Cool, But

[thelizman]

The implementation is actually just a CSS hack. What I would like to see is an html/xml markup that can be put into your source code, and which is part of the html standard. This is a very cool *idea* mind you, but something a little more practical would be an easier way to implement this on the fly.

Re:Very Cool, But

[bedroll]

What I would like to see is an html/xml markup that can be put into your source code, and which is part of the html standard.

Agreed.

I was really hoping that this would be a story on a script that interacted with a FireFox plugin so you could make a link that would open multiple tabs. Basically, if it were adopted as part of the HTML spec then developers could put it into their code and have the browser handle the secondary HREFs however they choose. Then the primary HREF would using syntax that is still able to be parsed by older browsers.

The only thing that worries me about such an implementation is the ability to abuse it. If done wrong it could be used to ruin a browsing experience just as badly, or maybe worse, as unchecked pop-ups.

cool side symptom

[Anonymous Coward]

distribute the /. effect

Firefox already supports multi-link bookmarks

[jeddak]

...in the Home Page URL in Preferences (or Options, depending on your OS), you can specify a multi-URL home page. The multi-URL format used is just pipe-delimited URLs (e.g. URL1|Url2|URL3...etc.)

Each URL is then opened in a separate tab. Very nice. More universal support for multi-links would be great.

Re:Firefox already supports multi-link bookmarks

[jeddak]

I forgot to mention the excellent Linky plugin for Firefox. But, to be fair, neither the Home Page URL nor Linky truly support multi-URL bookmarks. They're simply ways of handling multiple URL's in a single action.

Link Spam

[jrap]

Awsome! Now I can spam two sites with just one link tag.

Re:Link Spam

[Xeeble2]

Why stop at two?

The News Must be Slow Today

[Ambush Commander]

Moderators are getting pretty desperate hmm...

Better done in Markup

[kalidasa]

What we need is to add multilinking to XHTML, and get Mozilla, Safari, and IE to support it.

[a type='multilink' href='http://www.slashdot.org/defaultlinkfornon multilinkbrowsers']

[linkoption href='http://www.slashdot.org/firstlink' title='This is the first link']

[linkoption href='http://www.slashdot.org/secondlink' title='This is the second link']

[linkoption href='http://www.slashdot.org/thirdlink' title='This is the third link']

This is the text inside the link

[/a]

and have this appear as a small dropdown list below the link when you click the link.

Re:Better done in Markup

[temojen]

<style>
div.multilink {
height: 1em;
}

div.multilink:hover {
height: auto;
}

div.multilink:first-child {
text-decoration: underline;
}

div.multilink a {
display: block;
}
</style>
<div class="multilink">Example.com
<a href="http://www.example.com">direct link to example.com site</a>
<a href="http://www.example.com.nyud.net:8090">Corali zed example.com link</a>
</div>

???

Re:Better done in Markup

[Anonymous Coward]

Why express it in 18 lines of HTML/CSS when you can force browsers to add hundreds of lines of code to test and debug?

BTW, your div will never float over a dropdown box in IE7 (it remains to be seen whether the select tag's infinite z-order will be fixed in IE7. Personally, I hope it is, using an iframe and moving it around and filling its contents with document.write is a shitty kludge)

Re:Better done in Markup

[Anonymous Coward]

Whilst something like a popup menu for multiple links may sound interesting at first, it raises a lot of issues (I think). Whilst thus far most people have been mentioning the fear of opening a popup in a manner such as this and having 500 items listed, how about accessibility in general?

If I connect to your site using links how will a multi-link link be rendered ?? (afaik, there is no option to open a popup in this browser :)

If I am a blind user trying to access your site, how will my screen access software translate your multi-link to speech? etc

I think that one reason multi-links may not be implemented may perhaps simply be because it is difficult to render this information in an accessible manner.

Re:Better done in Markup

[Anonymous Coward]

sweeeet

Re:Better done in Markup

[Snaller]

Or even better: Well designed webpages where a link is a link - with a description.

Re:Better done in Markup

[kalidasa]

On my suggestion, the multilink degrades to a single link in browsers that can't handle multilinks. Of course, you need to get someone to add the code to the browser.

Nothing to see here. Move along -For once its true

[stry_cat]

For a long time people have talked about getting browser support for multilink feature.

I'd like to know who these people are. This is the first time I've heard of this multilink crap.

What the guy has done, is just create one of those JavaScript menus. He didn't even do a good job of it. Just google for JavaScript menu and you'll find a number that work in all the major and most minor browsers.

What are the /. editors smoking?!? It is time for new editors. Dup posts, pod slurping, what's next?

Nor accessible

[jjon]

The links aren't accessible at all via the keyboard in FireFox (not even the first link!).

So you can tell this is a lone coder who has never heard of accessibility for disabled people using websites. In the UK there is a new Disability Discrimination Act, and I guess the US probably has something similar.

(Not disabled myself, but I have been known to use the keyboard occasionally - mainly when I've just installed a PC, to try & figure out why the mouse doesn't work...).

Re:Nor accessible

[bedroll]

So you can tell this is a lone coder who has never heard of accessibility for disabled people using websites. In the UK there is a new Disability Discrimination Act, and I guess the US probably has something similar.

The ADA is what we have. I'm not sure if it's ever been used to force a website to be accessible, though.

Re:Nor accessible

[Intron]

US has the ADA which is a subsidy program for the concrete ramp industry. I've never heard of it being used for website access (yet).

Re:Nor accessible

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been known to use the keyboard occasionally - mainly when I've just installed a PC, to try & figure out why the mouse doesn't work

Or when the hand that should operate the mouse is, lets say, busy...

Re:Nor accessible

[bytemap]

It's supposed to be: http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/ada/websites2.htm
I believe it is also required for Federal websites.

Re:Nor accessible

[Joe U]

Which is why most federal websites look the way they do. Mostly text, lots of info, very little Flash.

Re:Nor accessible

[neil.pearce]

I'd never even tried to navigate under Firefox using keystrokes until I read your post - crikey it doesn't appear easy (couldn't find anything in the browser help pages)

I'm thinking that the act doesn't require all new "fancy features" to be available to all people...

Surely if the "main" link was accessible via standard key strokes, and a seperate list of hyperlinks (perhaps via an additional page) was available then then no discrimination would be taking place?

Re:Neither "fish" nor "flesh"

[ear1grey]

For a long time people have talked about self promotion on Slashdot. Self promotion its like a press release and usually involves some pet project that would most likely dwindle quietly into obscurity, but instead, has a fleeting shimmering moment in which to be globally lambasted.

Great, now instead of opening one pop-up

[melted]

Great, now instead of opening one pop-up a link will be able to open a hundred. Just what we need.

Re:Great, now instead of opening one pop-up

[ocelotbob]

Uh, that's already possible with popups now. This is more about getting talk about making a standardized way of doing multilink/menu type things. It's not useful to the internet at large as-is, but there are already people posting who have good ideas as to how to do this well.

open links in tabs

[tlahoda]

Temporarily forgetting about IE for a moment, a feature like this would only really be useful to me if I had the option (in the configuration or what not) of having the multi-links open multiple tabs (or new windows for ie). Possibly give people a warning as to how many tabs would be opened and letting them cancel out if they wished. Just a thought.

Slashdot to webserver!

[Anonymous Coward]

Multi-link this!!!

404 File Not Found

[th0mas.sixbit.org]

maybe he should try to get the skill of "one target" hyperlinks first?

this sounds like a bad idea

[graigsmith]

IMO this is a bad idea. i don't want this integrated into the browser, i think it would open alot of abuse problems. how would you like it if every link started opening 10-20 windows? thats excessive, and annoying. even if it was in firefox, where they are tabbed. i would rather click on a link, and get directed to that one link. This is one of those cases where the original technology is perfectly fine the way it is. Need multiple links for something? USE MULTIPLE LINKS THEN :) its that easy, and you don't confuse or annoy the person clicking them.

Re:this sounds like a bad idea

[cytoman]

You must be a long-time Slashdot reader, even though you got your id only recently... how do I know this? You obviously did not RTFA!

Wow..

[evanfrey]

That seems super annoying...

I've seen these before...

[jim_v2000]

I believe they're more commonly referred to as "Menus".

Re:Reply to this

[brokeninside]

[ ] No Karma Bonus [ ] Post Anonymously

Ever noticed either of those check boxes on the submission form?

How it should work

[wayne606]

Click on a multilink, you get a new browser window, and each of the targets are in a separate tab. That's how I would like to use it, at least. Should be trivial in javascript.

Re:How it should work

[Bob Loblaw]

Wouldn't that just be pop-ups all over again?

Re:How it should work

[wayne606]

A link can indicate the target should be opened in a new window. Maybe you can disable that behavior, but it's not happening when a page is loaded, it's in response to a mouse click, so Firefox (at least) lets it happen if popups are disabled.

The reason this would be nice behavior is that a multilink should open multiple pages with minimal fuss, but keep them grouped together. If there were such a thing as nested tabs that would come in handy here. But aside from that I think a toplevel with all the pages in it would be the best grouping mechanism.

Just giving you a menu of URL's you can select from is too much work for the user. Just open them all and let the user close them one by one when he's done.

Re:How it should work

[Larry Lightbulb]

It could grow like a hydra.

You're reading a page, you click a link and it opens into six tabs, you find the one which is 'correct' and start reading that. You've left the original tab open, plus the ones after the page you're now reading. At some point there's another link, which in turn opens into another six tabs. So now you've perhaps 10 tabs to search through to find the one with the information from the link you just clicked on that you want to read.

Re:How it should work

[wayne606]

That's why you want to group the tabs together that came in the same multilink. You'd have 3 windows each of which has the "correct" tab on top. Maybe a command to close all tabs in a window except for the current one would be nice also.

Multilink Shmultilink

[Anonym1ty]

Add whatever support you want, but make sure I can turn it off so I don't click on a link to get 50,000 other advertizement pages.

I can see the advantages of this right away. I can also see the problems this will cause. I choose not to participate.

Relies on invalid markup

[Anonymous Coward]

An examination the page source reveals that the trick relies on invalid HTML. It puts an unordered list inside a span, which is a no-no. Inline elements can't contain block elements.

Disappointing.

Hi, my name is Sybil

[Dark Coder]

And I have a multi-link to my home page.

A page for Leanne, ...
a page for Thomas, ...
a page for Christy, ...
a page for (shuddering) JIM,

Hold on, I'm not done switching into my 12 different personalities...

a page for ...

Lambaste away!

[Anonymous Coward]

This biatch deserves to be lambasted. But, I can't blame someone for trying to stake a claim to fame, even if their idea is lame. I can on the otherhand blame the editor for posting a lame ass self promotional POS article. It is the editor that really deserves the lambasting!

Lambaste away!

Re:Lambaste away!

[code_elite]

It's a shame... I think the same. Isn't this a fun game? Btw, what's your name?

Re:Lambaste away!

[kaens]

My name is lame. Ask me again, and I'll tell you the same. From the day I came, I existed to maim - which some consider a shame, but they have failed to keep me tame.

What it should have been.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I read the article text, I thought that it would be something cool. But it isn't. What I imagined was something like this:

<a href="http://www.mirrordot.org/blah.zip.torrent",1
href="magnet://123456789ABC1233389ABC/blah.zip", 1
href="http://www.slashdot.org/blah.zip",0>
Cli ck here to download</a>

When clicked on, the browser would randomly choose between the addresses based on the weighting in the HTML (the torrent & magnet links more likely than the HTTP one). It could also fall back to the regular http address if the others fail.

It would also allow different link types within the same link - regular http, magnet and torrent links all within the same physical URL. If the weighting was zero, that link would only be tried once all the others fail - and would provide automatic client-side failover from the regular http address should the original server go down.

And a right-click in the browser would include a list of the alternative addresses so the end-user could manually choose a particular URL. I'd suggest a double or dotted underline to differentiate these types of links from regular ones.

This would be an easy way of client-side load distribution and help to get more robust download protocols (eg: p2p magnet) more actively involved in doing what they do best - distributing large files.

But this sort of thing is easily done in Javascript of course, so while neat, probably isn't worth building into the browser.

Obligatory Opera user

[Anonymous Coward]

This is something pretty surprising, I haven't run into one of these for a long time, and last time it was with IE... something that only appears to work in one of the browsers I use. Totally fails in Opera, making the link unusable, and from what I read in other comments, more or less the same thing happens in IE.

Re:Obligatory Opera user

[fa2k]

Hi, I posted this before, but it's way down and a bit cryptic. I'm almost positive that the script does some kind of UA detection. It's fine for one personal page, but when you release a 'toolkit', I think you should be a bit more professional and less evangelical about the browser in use. I can't be 100% sure (there may be some relative href's or src's that IE didn't get), but FF displays the 'IE' page when saved locally from IE. Opera gets the IE page. 'Identify as Mozilla' in Opera doesn't change anything, so I might be wrong about the UA thing.

Re:Obligatory Opera user

[fa2k]

Update; Saving to disk in Opera gives a slightly broken version of the FF page. Either the code's or the browser's DTHML is broken.

Re:Obligatory Opera user

[fa2k]

oh man, I shouldn't be posting today.. that is: Saving to disk in FireFox gives a ...

There is only one way of doing this

[bazmail]

The only reliable way I know of to open many links from one is by using bukster style links. check out Ben Godgers firefox plugin called Magpie. It supports this link style.

Dear editors...

[jlarocco]

Dear editors:
If Donald Knuth, Linus Torvalds, or some other famous developer submits an article about something cool they're making, people might care. But nobody cares about some dumbass' broken firefox plugin. The advertisements here are supposed to be the banner ads, not the articles.
Thank you.

Re:Dear editors...

[Anonymous Coward]

who is Donald Knuth?

Re:Dear editors...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the same way that TV has to use product placement and sponsorship to reach the ad-skippers, slashdot needs to reach those who use adblock.

Good God NO!

[Run4yourlives]

1. A mutli-link is not intuitive...One click, one window, one location is the way it should be.

2. A multi-link is asking for abuse the same way java script opening windows is asking for abuse.

Please, don't push this on the poor users.

This is useless.

[clandestine_nova]

Seriously, is it *that* slow of a news day? This hack is neither well-implemented nor does it have any real use. The example the author mentioned doesn't even make sense, because links are not, and never were, supposed to work like that - they don't make sense for multiple targets, as that is a page design decision, not a DOM decision. This so-called multi-linking is silly, semantically nonsensical, and simply adds bloat to otherwise clear pages.

Re:This is useless.

[ngibbins]

links are not, and never were, supposed to work like that

You're incorrect. The hypertext research community, particularly that part which deals with open hypermedia (where links are stored separately from documents) have considered links with multiple targets, or n-ary links, to be a useful navigational structure. This dates back at least as far as Ted Nelson's Xanadu from the 1960s, and has featured in a number of later systems, including Microcosm, Hyper-G/Hyper-Wave, and the W3C Xlink specification.

The Web may be the most widespread hypertext system, but the model of hypertext embodied by the A element is very simple, consisting of embedded unidirectional one-way links. XLink was a W3C attempt to remedy this which has so far failed to gain any noticeable support, but the W3C Annotea system could trivially be expanded to support first-class n-ary links.

Re:This is useless.

[clandestine_nova]

Fair enough; I wasn't aware of that. I do, however, stand by my statement that it doesn't really make sense. I'm all for innovation and changing the way that things work, but only if those changes actually make sense in a real world environment.

If someone could provide some examples - realistic ones - of ways this could help usability and design, I'd be glad to hear it. From what I've seen so far, though, it seems just like a nifty idea with no practical value.

Re:This is useless.

[ngibbins]

To some extent, I agree with you. I've seen quite a few systems with n-ary links, but I've yet to see a convincing interface that lets the user select which of the link endpoints they wish to visit without imposing an unacceptable cognitive overhead.

The closest I've seen are n-ary links which when traversed present the user with a composite document made up of the link endpoints - think of a link which opens multiple tabs in a browser. All those which force the user to choose a destination from a menu or an intermediate link page (like the Wiki example that was the subject of this article) force the user to make that choice without a great deal of information. Titles, bibliographic metadata and even excerpts don't necessarily give users what they need to discriminate between the endpoints.

Ideally, the hypertext system should be able to select the most appropriate endpoint from an n-ary link based on the user's browsing history and context. One of the other commenters on this article gave a good example from the Wiki world where this would be a real benefit, namely the proliferation of disambiguation pages in Wikipedia et al. If you're reading a page on chemical structures and you follow a link marked "orbital", you should be taken to a page about electrons, and not even see that there's a page about a musician of that name unless you explicitly ask for it. There's a lot of research on topics related to this in the adaptive hypermedia community.

Moderate the Editors?

[ZeldorBlat]

Mod this down as offtopic or flamebait as you see fit, but /. should allow moderators to mod the orignal story post itself.

I find this story:

1) Interesting
2) Funny
3) Informative
4) Entirely misrepresentitive of the underlying story
4) Shameless self-promotion of an un-original idea that doesn't really work
5) Shameless self-promotion of lame artwork involving recycled hardware

Extremely Poor Solution

[Ralman]

Just like the so-called 'fancy radio buttons' article from last week, this is yet another useless solution to an already solved problem.

Simple solution:
A list of links. Generally a bulleted list.

The problem with both this multilink thing, and the fancy form buttons, is that they are NOT accessible to anyone using a screen-reader, older browsers, lynx, and sometimes keyboard navigation.

I can't see the code in action, but my guess is that you need a mouse, and to be able to 'see' the menu in order for it to work.

With most of the work I am doing recently, I have to make my sites and web applications as accessible as possible to individuals with disabilities.

Yeah, I used to be one of those people who didn't care, but with only a small change in coding style, and decent markup, making an accessible site really is not that hard.

Re:Extremely Poor Solution

[joelsanda]

Just like the so-called 'fancy radio buttons' article from last week, this is yet another useless solution to an already solved problem.

Right on. Semantics exist for a reason. The need for a plug-in to interprest hyperlinks is like using secret code words or numbers when referring people to someone else, then giving them a booklet to look the reference up; or giving them a string of results all run together and a tool to decipher.

Hopefully stuff like this - like ActiveX - will soon go away. We need the web to stay clean so we can find stuff!

Mod Points

[ear1grey]

How timely, I have mod points: can someone please invent (and then shamelessly self-promote) a plugin that lets me mod the parent story down?

Re:Mod Points

[Bullseye_blam]

The only way to vote in that manner is to stop reading Slashdot.

which I'm on the verge of doing

PmWiki is not excellent

[arrowman]

Sorry, but PmWiki is not excellent. If you hadn't slashdotted it's site, we could have looked up the insane instructions to password-protect page editing. Let me just quote from the Google cache: "the username field usually isn't used by PmWiki". Note the 'usually'.

I am to blame!

[Anonymous Coward]

I must confess, it was I that started same. Oh my name is shame.

Mod Parent Up

[handy_vandal]

An examination the page source reveals that the trick relies on invalid HTML. It puts an unordered list inside a span, which is a no-no. Inline elements can't contain block elements.

You hit that nail right on the head.

-kgj

Section 508

[Anonymous Coward]

Section 508 is what you're striving to get out :)

What about wooden ramps...

[HardCase]

...you insensitive clod!

Re:What about wooden ramps...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wooden ramps can't support the morbidly obese.

Only certified high strength concrete installed by certified union craftsmen will fully meet the requirements.

What a complete waste of my time.

[Random Q. Hacker]

Slashdot should act as a filter against this kind of crap, NOT A PROMOTER OF IT. If you view the source you can see it's just a freakin DHTML popup.

Do the people posting these stories even know how to program?

Better?

[GileadGreene]

Is this better? :-)

I'd rather use the old way of linking multiple pages

Re:Better?

[fmobus]

Weird... all I see is

I'd [ .org] rather [ .org] use [ .org] the [ .org] old [ .org] way [ .org] of [ .org] linking [ .org] multiple [ .org] pages

So the first post is...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

...4 paragraphs long and actually interesting and relevant. Something fishy is going on here. 10,000 people could have posted "first post" in the time it took to write that comment. Let's see, maybe I missed something...no, I'm browsing at -1 so I see everything. I declare you are a cheat! You must have a time machine, or you've colluded with the person who posted the story.

UA Detection alert

[fa2k]

I browsed the page with Opera and saved it locally in FF -- I hate it when they do that!

With slashdot articles it's the opposite

[zippthorne]

Multiple links are not sufficient to point to a single target. Often there are several words highlighted in a sentence, any of which have an equal chance of being "the article" due to the hyperlinking of articles and other common words. I might want to read all of them for context, but I might not be interested in the sidetracks the summarizer thinks are relevant or funny.

Re:Nothing to see here. Move along -For once its t

[neil.pearce]

What the guy has done, is just create one of those JavaScript menus

Really? I have JavaScript turned off and it still works...

correction

[temojen]

div.multilink {
height: 1em;
overflow: hidden;
}

Once again....

[im_thatoneguy]

Once again Open Source proponents give Microsoft Users the Big Finger. Just because they can. "...if there is demand..." I don't know I would call more than 80% of the internet populace sufficient demand to implement a very small nugget of code to give full functionality. This doesn't exactly look like a breakthrough code snippet anyways, The idea of a drop down box on hover for several options is clever but doesn't really involve more than about 15 lines of CSS, plus another 15 for IE support, matter of fact I guarantee you that IE support could be added, without the creator even having to write any code on his own.

Re:Once again....

[im_thatoneguy]

Sorry for the double post... but I just found this too funny.

The developer's slogan is:

"Good Design, Good work."

Now if that isn't catchy I don't know what is.

Your new job: MAKE it compatible! :P

[urbieta]

Ive seen so many DHTML hacks arround the net, that I can simply asure you that someone will come up with a propper workarround so that your dumb workarround idea to11, 22, 33, is fully supported under Mozilla (and friends), IE, Opera, Webcore, KHTML, etc, etc, etc and what not.

I just dont understand why you cant simply make it a small library to be included in any page and called with javascript so that it is widespread and not leace it stuck to a weird wiki only module, WTF is wrong with my own php coded micro app?

LINK REL="Multilink" TITLE="Multilink" HREF="/Multilink.css" TYPE="application/rss+xml"
script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"
src="Multilink.js" /script

After this code you could do someting smarter with a couple javascript document.write things so that, if javascript is enabled show your fancy popup window BUT if there is no javascript then an user will simply see plain old html links.

so the real question is: why the F*ck is it so urgent to completely outdate old and not-so-old browsers all of the sudden? gees!

Get a life! ..go read cosmopolitan or something lol

NOOOOooooo ![/darth]

[88NoSoup4U88]

*shudders at the thought of a link containg both Goatse and Tubgirl*

Not very useful for Wikipedia either

[celephaix]

This wouldn't work well with the example you mention, Wikipedia. Most people access Wikipedia articles through the search box, and with this plugin installed you still get fowarded to a disambiguation page. Not terribly useful IMO.

In-browser function

[phorm]

First, for the obvious: it's not a multi-target hyperlink, it's a dropdown. However, the idea of dropdown-select style hyperlink isn't a bad one... perhaps something that could be included in an HTML spec for the future.

At first though, I thought that this would be for a hyperlink that opens multiple locations (best-served with tabs). This would have the potential to be really annoying in the case of popup sites or if some bozo linkbombs you, but with most browsers in the future supporting tabs it does have promise. Simply have the link open multiple tabs, and then have a browser-setting that can determine how many tabs can be opened by a single link, or give a warning if over the limit.

For example, you could have a "news" link that opens several news pages, or something of the like. This can also likely be accomplished with JavaScript (though I've never tried JS /w tabs, is there a spec)... but it would be a neat concept for future features to fully integrate the power of tabbed browsing.

Won't work for Mac users...

[Petronius]

...their mouse only has one button.

target of opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

A multilink is a link that points to more than one targets.

Meh, looks like editors can't tell the difference between one and many.

WHY?

[venomkid]

Why would anyone put two URLs under a single link? Isn't it the point of a link to be an abstracted method of invoking a URL, with link text for context? You're not supposed to *see* the URL.

This method just pops up a bunch of confusing as hell URLs whenever you mouse over a link without any kind of description. What about the massively cryptic URLs that e-commerce sites create. How am I supposed to pick from a list of those?

I think this entire idea is based on bad assumptions.

(Not to mention that the fancy gradient feature on the list of choices darkens some of the links to near unreadability.)

People seem to miss your point

[SuperKendall]

I have to say that sometimes, I see an inetresting story early (being a subscriber) and really do sit down and work a thoughtful response even before it becomes available to the public. I don't think I've ever got FP (like anyone would really care) but I have got in a pretty early response a few time that was a lot more interesting than most of the other first twenty posts.

I don't do it too often though, as sometimes stories never quite make it to publication...

I think it is a great effect of the subscription system that it lets people craft responses before publication. In fact I'd almost like to see a sort of early "pre-publish" phase where subscribers could post and also score posts (one vote per post per subscriber), with the lowest 50% of the posts being dropped before publication. Then right off the bat you'd have some interesting responses with less noise.

Re:People seem to miss your point

[Orgazmus]

sometimes stories never quite make it to publication...

i might become a subscriber just to see what the hell they stop before it goes public. i guess thats where the informal and interesting stories went.

becoming a standard

[a.d.trick]

mabye this could become incorporated into the XLink standard. Using javascript (as previous people have done) seems quite barbaric to me and it looses it's semantics and breaks horribly in a few browsers. Using CSS (what this example does) works well but, surprise, surprise! it doesn't work in IE and it still doesn't quite have the proper semantics.

YES

[Anonymous Coward]

This the first thing I thought of after reading the article.
This technology only opens up many doors for advertisers to more easily piss people off by flooding them with popups.
Sure the technology already exists, but once it is easier to be annoying, there will be more and more idiots using it.

Palace of Westminster on Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, for a reference site like Wikipedia, where there are a lot of links sprinkled throughout an article, would it be nice to have links to Palace and Westminster included in the link to Palace of Westminster?

Both Palace and Westminster are linked from their use in context on Palace of Westminster.

roman_mir...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I could swear your post is attacking Kainaw ("Or did it become to comlicated to implement for you?")! On the ofchance that this is actually (!) what you intended to do, I would like to remind you that the modification you requested is a simple matter of user preferences, and in no way reflects upon Kainaw, except that he prefers clicking to hovering, and that he cannot read you mind.

As for your suggestion that this would be a complicated change, try changing the line that reads "this.element.onclick = function()" to "this.element.onmouseover = function()", in the file "kfb.js". Based on this code, I seriously doubt this would be beyond the scope of incredibly easy implementation for its author.

~nog_lorp

No.

[wandernotlost]

A properly defined standard and a browser plugin would make this idea go much farther.

Please no. Kill it now. Seriously, this is just another really bad idea that seems sort of neat that will make the web harder to use, like embedding your entire website in a flash animation. *shudder*

Here's why: Do you really think that a disambiguation entry that takes up a whole page in wikipedia is better expressed by a little popup window that you won't even see unless you move your mouse over the link? It's just more information that won't make it into search engines, that will confuse users, and that will encourage designers to produce websites that are difficult to navigate. Did you notice that with all that fancy multi-link functionality, the author didn't manage to link to a single other source that thought this was a good idea? Really, folks, it's not that hard to just add a footnote or parenthetical remark (see also fake links), and doing that is so much easier on the reader.

Stop making it so damned hard to get useful information out of a website!

Thank you.

P.S. I'm not kidding, just take that idea out into your backyard and bury it deep under the ground where no one will find it. I know, you're thinking, "Ooh, but it would be kind of cool if it were just integrated into the browser and you'd just get a nice list of links to click on." No. Just think of all the information that you'd need to present to the user to help her decide which one to pick. It just doesn't work in a little popup. Here, I'll get the shovel.

You want to change the HTML spec?

[The Woodworker]

Then how about something simple. Like being able to assign different actions(i.e. locations) for different buttons with the same form, without javascript. As a web developer, I can't count the number of hours this would save me. And while I've never written an html parser, I can't imagine this would be too difficult. Wait! I CALL PATENT DIBS!

Oh, god, no, please!

[Kamiza Ikioi]

Ah, multi-target urls? I picture this as clicking 1 link, opening 2 different links; though, drop down menus all over a page could be just as annoying.

I'm picturing yet another feature that will only useful to spam companies. I'd like to throw this idea in the trash next to pop-up(under) windows, blinking text, flash pseudo pop-ups, and the marquee tag.

None of which are bad in and of themselves, just how they are used. All we need now is for wikipedia to turn into an annoying version del.icio.us, with every word linked to search results of that word. (BTW, the link for "that" I believe is the definition of irony.)

Now, imagine this used on a whole page, with each one popping up a list of 20 links. This isn't a new idea, but just the idea of everyone using it just turns my stomach.

It's not the story, it's the replies!

[alex2]

I, for one, like to see these kinds of stories. The replies are great!

So... What's the hype really about?

[Jorgensen]

The author describes multilinking as something lacking and almost *necessary* (!?) I don't get that.

Looking at the implementation (yes: i use Firefox, but that's not important now) it's just a pop-up menu of clickable URLs!

Sorry guys, but I cannot see how this is better than "proper" links.

If I need to link to multiple places, multiple <a href="..."> tags will do the trick nicely. Since the links will go to different places, they deserve different textual descriptions and thus different <a> tags. Just giving the user a list of URLs is bad: it is also known as Mystery Meat Navigation [webpagesthatsuck.com]. You need to give people hints about where the link goes - stuff that will actually help in their decision of whether to click this link or some other link. Just the URLs isn't enough - 12 out of 10 people don't understand them anyway.

Using javascript for this is simply evil: It will make the user experience reliant on javascript and thus shut out a large number of viewers. And you have to deal with javascript incompatibilities between browsers too.

And then you suggest making a browser plugin too? Why why on earth why? Should our pages rely on that being installed too? Thank you, but NO thank you.

To cut a long story short (i know: it's a bit late now..) This just re-invents the wheel. badly.

The only possible use I can see for this is for listing mirrors or some primitive form of load balancing. And both of those uses has far better solutions available already...

Why multilink is bad.

[Hecatonchires]

Multilink allows bad sites to include bad links on their nominal 'good' links. Kinda hard not to click that link when its included as the second link on every one you click.

It doesn't work in Galeon, either.

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget the unwashed 80%.. I can't get it to work in any of my browsers either (and no, until Firefox fixes the several brain-damaged UI mistakes it has, like a single close button for N number of tabs (wtf??), I won't be switching). If this thing is really Firefox-specific, is anyone under the impression that that is BETTER than being IE-specific? Open-source or not, working in only ONE browser makes it proprietary in my book.

Besides (to the OP), please don't talk about "standards" when you are trying to sell something like this. Go read the *actual* standards (e.g. DOM), and you might have a better idea of the scope for such things.

Stop talking about standards...

[Anonymous Coward]

...when you clearly haven't read them.

That idea is most emphatically *not* cool (or even remotely practical). Modern HTML is a subset of the XML Document Object Model. There is no practical (or, imho, useful) way for the DOM to support multiple attributes of the same name on an element.

Reading and understanding the existing standards, and knowing *why* they are that way, should be a prerequisite for suggesting new ones, or changes (especially grossly incompatible ones like this).

And by the way, fwiw, the way links work now is actually just fine. Kthx.

Hear hear!

[Snaller]

I also wish people would stop abusing stylesheets to lock fonts at a tiny unreadable size (which you can't scale in MSIE)

Re:Hear hear!

[wandernotlost]

Yes, that's pretty annoying. Firefox lets you set a minimum font size, which effectively defeats such abuse.

Re:Hear hear!

[Snaller]

I'd like to use Firefox if it could default to storing the config in its current directory (instead of 'my documents').

(I'm using MYIE which does just that, so that I'm free to run with the same set up wether i invoke it from one machine or another, regardless of which windows is current)

Re:Hear hear!

[wandernotlost]

What about firefox -P <profile>? (I have no idea whether or not the args are the same on Windows.) I know that's not a default, but I'm not sure what you mean by, "could default."

Re:Hear hear!

[mpontes]

You can do that with Firefox by creating a new profile. I have my Profile folder in a FAT partition so I can use the same Bookmarks / cookies under Linux and Windows.

Re:Hear hear!

[Snaller]

I know that's not a default, but I'm not sure what you mean by, "could default."

As in "Will look in current directory before looking anywhere else - including registry settings and commandline switches)

Re:Hear hear!

[Snaller]

It still looks in my documents to find where the new profile is.
And I prefer a program that checks the current directory before it looks anywhere else.

I guess I should have rephrased my earlier statement from "I'd like" to "I'd be willing" to switch over if the program supported my needs, and it doesn't currently (there is also some javascript incompatiblity, and I don't think it does mouse gestures)

Re:Hear hear!

[mpontes]

Are you booting with the right profile? Create a new profile in the folder you want, then delete your old one.

Re:Hear hear!

[Snaller]

Then it looks in the windows folder, finds nothing and assumes its a new install. Unless you mean if one creates the profile IN the firefox directory, I didn't try that.

Independent management of links and their targets

[DukunSakti]

Because this is a wiki solution, the targets are stored in a file separate from the context page. The use of a wiki makes it tremendously simple for the end user to define new multilinks and their targets, and also for the web developer to provide and maintain the service--because, as with any wiki, the end users become the maintainer of the context file, the multilinks, and the multilink targets. That is the reason I think wiki is a great platform for implementing multilinks.

Also, each multilink exists as a metafile and has the ability to store numerous other attributes. I'm working on support to record the target contributor's ID, user-voted ranking, and number of click-throughs, to name some useful ones. Also I thought it will be useful, as a proof of concept, to construct a densely linked site on a particular subject, which could demonstrate the usefulness of multiheaded links.

I personally think this is great because this can be used to exercise and test some of the more general hypertext concepts, so we can advance the research effort further with widely available tools.

It *is* a dropdown menu...

[DukunSakti]

You don't need to apologize, there is nothing wrong in having a civil discussion on an interesting subject.

Let's be clear, it is about an existing, non-revolutionary concept, that has been around since the 60's.

The particular implementation that I have created *is* a dropdown menu. The same kind that you use everyday for accessing many functions in your computer applications--no new or special knowledge is required to use them. But, unlike the typical use, it is made to show multiple destination addresses for a collection of words that appear in a web page and let you follow the ones that seem interesting. What's cool about this is *not* that it is a dropdown menu--as you've pointed out any twelve year olds can do that--but the kinds of pages that you could now easily create that can contain many of these multilinks. I said easily, because the feature is integrated with a wiki, and so creating a new multilink is a simple act of marking up the sentences minimally. Again easily, because the underlying wiki does the independent maintenance of the targets metafile. You do that with your 12 lines of Javascript code one at a time for a few pages with a few drop down menus, each one unique and arbitarily defined by the web user, and you'll soon discover that you need and want a more manageable method to do it. Which is what this allows you to do.

If you don't see the interesting implications there, then, unfortunately, you're not the right audience for this--and for that, *I* would apologize.

Re:It *is* a dropdown menu...

[Shaper_pmp]

Ah, I see where you're coming from now - the ease of use and wiki-integration rather than user-interface or concept.[1]

That's fair, but I still think you'll find a lot of /.ers will consider it too trivial to be front-pageworthy. Again, I don't know how difficult it is to write PmWiki plugins specifically, but in terms of the task I could write you a Perl RegExp (or at most a few lines of Perl) that would take some minimally-formatted plain text and turn it into a cross-browser, standards-compliant DHTML menu - all you've really got to do is parse the markup for links, massage them into HTML and paste them as items into a pre-working DHTML menu.

I figured there had to be some angle here (namely the Wiki-integration) that was newsworthy - unfortunately the implementation of the front-end (DHTML menu) isn't up to much, so you're probably going to have an awful lot of people going "So what?" until it's pretty, well-coded and cross-browser-compatible.

So, old idea, nice integration, interface needs some work ;-)

Footnotes:

[1] I think the Slashdot article overplayed the "revolutionary user-interface advance" angle and underplayed the "handy Wiki addition" one - this is (in part) why you've copped such a lot of flak so far.

Re:It *is* a dropdown menu...

[DukunSakti]

Hey, no hard feelings... :-)

I always welcome comments and suggestions.

A useful way to put context around your bookmarks

[DukunSakti]

If you do that, you will find this a very useful way to organize your links.

With this, you could have many bookmark menus spread in a page that you author yourself, so that you could put all the appropriate context that you want around the bookmarks.

You'll appreciate the usefulness once you give it a try. PmWiki is a very simple to install, and will run locally on your laptop or desktop if you don't have a server. Believe me, I collect a lot of contextual links myself for a living, because I do a lot of research. And the combination of a wiki and multilinks is tremendously useful.

On compatibility

[DukunSakti]

One more thing...

If everyone insists that being compatible with a broken system is an important goal, then we will never get out of having to write hacks to get a *simple* thing implemented.

We will all be better off standing up and saying, you know what, this does not work well in this environment, so I'll switch and I recommend that you do the same. That's what will change the situation.

Repeating their mantra and saying that we have to follow because they have 80% of the marketshare will simply not help making the situations any better, and will not change the statistics.

Make a difference, be brave, and make a statement about your preferred browser.

Re:On compatibility

[Shaper_pmp]

You're right, of course - standing up and being counted is a noble effort, and one which I attempt to support at every opportunity.

That said, there is a certain level of professionalism necessary in web design - for example, the most important requirement is that information is accessible first, pretty second.

By this metric you can make the "Firefox experience" of a page as spanky as you like, and the "IE experience" as plain and ugly as you want - as long as the lowest-level version has all its content accessible.

What I think most of the experienced webmasters (including myself) here were complaining about was not that the menu system worked better in Firefox, nor even that it had the (slightly juvenile, if this is intended for a wider audience than a personal website) "SWITCH TO Firefox NOW" incitement slapped on it - we were complaining that it didn't work at all in IE.

Ploughing all your design efforts into the version for your favourite browser is fine, but allowing this to make the base content inaccessible to other browsers is (unarguably) poor design.

Remember - accessibility before prettiness ;-)

"We will all be better off standing up and saying, you know what, this does not work well in this environment, so I'll switch and I recommend that you do the same. That's what will change the situation."

Not in web design, mate. In web design refusing to work with the browser that has 80%+ market share means no-one looks at your page. I can't imagine a page important enough that I'd seriously consider changing my default browser to view it, and I've got Firefox, IE, and Opera already downloaded and installed.

In addition, (with the DHTML menu) you aren't doing anything that hasn't already been done on a million other sites, and those all work with IE. This heavily implies (even to uneducated users) that it's not IE that's poor, just that you don't know what you're doing with web design.

Basically, if IE's got 80% market share, then any "principled stand" that excludes it is just cutting off your nose to spite your face. Instead, make sure both versions work (so you don't look bad), but make the Firefox one prettier (so IE looks bad). This means you still look good, you've made your point, and the user isn't forced to suffer because of a choice ("which browser to use") they might not even have made.

Incidentally, many thanks for a calm and considered response. Having re-read my first post I was hardly gentle in my criticism - you have my apologies. ;-)

Re:On compatibility

[DukunSakti]

One of my previous contributions to PmWiki is a skin called SimpleSkin which, among others, features a popup menu to replace the sidebar, and it works equally well on IE, Firefox, and Safari.

The problem is, and you certainly know the issue, to make it work on IE, I have to resort to special, additional Javascript code to handle it. Not that it is a bad way to do things, but I'm just really dissatisfied with the fact that I have to do special case programming when a perfectly good standard is available, except that it is not implemented well in IE, and have been like that for a very long time already!

The truth is, if there is enough demands from the real and interested users, I will be "enhancing" the multilink code to support IE in the manner that you described in your posting. I'm just not going to do that voluntarily without expressing my view. Remember, this is an open source, unpaid work, so I have the opportunity to make the statement without hurting me financially--and so I did it.

I do understand that making similar statements in a commercial context is much harder. But I have done so as well, and succeeded, in the past, in my role as a Chief Architect and Project Manager in a number of commercial projects. I just want to encourage people to take the risk of being rejected, but try it anyway, rather than not say anything and accept the status quo. You'd be surprised as to how willing the customer will listen to you when you present the option (of not supporting IE completely). This is especially true in *very controlled environments* such as corporate intranets and perhaps open source projects.

I appreciate your suggestions, accept your apologies, and will definitely give your ideas a consideration in refining the multilink implementation. ;-)

Bonus: Opera support

[gknoy]

Not only that, it works in opera. The menu referenced by TFA hasn't in either of the ones I've used.

I liked the radial menu, somewhat ... :) But the icons could do with being larger and not mystery-meatish ... (Well, OK, so I recognized most of the icons.. but still. ;))

Cool script, though... how well does it degrade?

Not that exciting

[SuperKendall]

It onlly happens rarely - mostly what you see is what you get, I wouldn't subscribe just for a reveal of untold story treasures!

I subscribe though just because I still dervive a lot of enjoyment from reading Slashdot and why not support what you like.