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."
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.
Next: Slashdot featuring multiple first post.
-- Reality checks don't bounce.
this sure is a small time story for a website like slashdot. can i post up little odd-end hacks i've created? ;)
I'd rather use the old way of linking multiple pages.
Web Design Tips
Now /. readers will be able to /. not just one website with a single click, but many websites also with a single click.
And BTW, be careful of Jeff Bezos coming right after you for this obvious - Single Click Amazon IP violation.
You can't handle the truth.
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
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.
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.
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?
...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.
[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.
I believe they're more commonly referred to as "Menus".
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he'll wipe out the species.
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...