Slashdot Mirror
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."
this sure is a small time story for a website like slashdot. can i post up little odd-end hacks i've created? ;)
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.
You can't ignore IE unless your wiki happens to be something like a Firefox support wiki. :) (That's what windows machines are for, really, downloading stuff when your Linux machine is offline...but I digress.)
You especially can't ignore IE if you're having trouble with Firefox!
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.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
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:
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.
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.
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.)
[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.
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.
boakes.org
Great, now instead of opening one pop-up a link will be able to open a hundred. Just what we need.
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.
Maybe not
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.
Discworld.
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.
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
MLINK
OPTION="Site 1" VALUE="http://site1.com"
OPTION="Site 2" VALUE="http://site2.com"
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.
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.
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.)
vk.
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.
Question everything
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.
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...
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...
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself