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

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.

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: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

[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: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.

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!