[ba-unrev-talk] Granular Addressability in HTML Documents - ON THE FLY
Doug Englebart gave us Augment and Eugene E. Kim gave us Purple. I am pleased
to announce: PurpleSlurple (PS). The idea is the same as Purple, "granular
addressability in HTML documents", but this solution attempts to facilitate
and apply this functionality to documents that already exist on the Web. Purple on-the-fly as it were. (01)
[NOTE: I am not aware of any scripts that currently offer this functionality,
and I'm surprised there aren't any. Which means it's very likely that I've
overlooked them. If anyone is aware of any please point me to them.] (02)
As an example I've pointed PS at Eugene E. Kim's "An Introduction to
Purple" (even though it's redundant to do so since the document already has
Purple numbers). Below is the link, generated by PS, to the "Granular
Addressability in HTML Documents" paragraph. (03)
http://mas.homelinux.net/~matsch/potf.php?theurl=http://www.eekim.com/software/purple/purple.html#purp97 (04)
This implementation is nowhere close to release (as any will see who look), but I think the basic concept is workable and offers utility and quite frankly I wanted to get it out there. I would be interested in any feedback. (05)
Give it a try yourself at: http://mas.homelinux.net/~matsch/potf.php (06)
Best regards, (07)
Matthew A. Schneider (08)
---- some "technical" and not so technical stuff ---- (09)
P.S. It should be obvious that PS works best with well structured
text-heavy Web pages (i.e., no sense in pointing it at Yahoo), but that's
where all the action is anyway. (010)
Hint: For graphic intensive pages, the "printer friendly" version of a page will likely work better than the "normal" page. (011)
Also, I am currently adding to the script so that images whose source is specified by a relative URL will display properly. (012)
If you're running Mozilla (your not? ;) One can add a so called "Bookmark Keyword" (http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/bookmarks/) to enable PS in the address bar. I've created one using keyword "p". Now to apply Purple numbers to the page I'm viewing I simply click into the address bar and type "p " in front of the URL - instant Purple numbers applied to the page. One could also create a javascript bookmarklet for one-click Purple numbers (coming soon!). (013)
The Purple numbers generated by PS are in and of themselves fairly meaningless (in the case of PS it happens to be the line number of the document as reported by my program). Web pages that have "real" Purple numbers have the numbers applied at design time. These Purple numbers correspond to properly sequenced heading and paragraph numbers. I make no attempt to order my numbers in such a manner. Because of the way that most people (improperly) use HTML, it would be virtually impossible to do this with existing Web pages. (014)