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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."
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: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
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.
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.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
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?
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?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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.
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?
boakes.org
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.
/w tabs, is there a spec)... but it would be a neat concept for future features to fully integrate the power of tabbed browsing.
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