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.