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? ;)
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.
[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.
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.
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.