Re: <LINK> idea

[Phil Wolff <pwolff@xxxxxxxx>]

This is a lovely idea. The "service link" tag.

There seem to be two parts to this:

(A) one is the invoking of another document that drives an additional
layer of
markup to the calling document. Microsoft Word and desktop publishing
packages
offer indexing and table-of-contents services at publication time. This
would be
on demand, on the fly construction of links using a potentially dymanic
list of
terms.

(B) The other is the human interaction with the page to separate out
"service"
links like this from "editorial" links like we usually have.

1. Can I have more than one source of definitions? Perhaps a local one
and a
global or public one? Does the user get all xrefs or is there a
hierachy?

2. Is there only one type of service link?
Would this kind of service be unidimensional, strictly for definitions
of terms?
Or can we auto-link text for other purposes? This would affect both the
linking
and the user interface.

How about if I right-click on a term...
- bringing Translation of this word into another language?
- bringing up a "right click menu" of related bookmarks? if you treat
each
sentence and the
- showing other occurances of this word? think of the index in the back
of a
book.
- bringing up some other attribute of the word, perhaps its "readability
index",
its frequency on this site, if it is trademarked or symbol marked?

3. If we have multiple service link types, how do you choose what to
present?

4. Would you want your service links deployed prior to rendering of the
page?
This could seriously slow first presentation of the page.

I think this is a dandy and powerful idea, futhering the definitions of
hypertext as we know them.

Shawn Steele wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'd like to see some sort of LINK tag that could reference a glossary of
> terms for a particular page, probably an XML list.  Something like <LINK
> src="glossary.xml">
>
> Then mozilla could use that information to let users click on words that
> appear in the glossary, to receive a definition.  This could be a great help
> to technical documentation.  Current <A> tags don't really work for things
> like this because everything would look the same to the user and they
> couldn't tell which links were going to show them new pages, and which would
> be just a short definition or clarification.  In addition adding <A> tags to
> all of the words on an entire page would be a logistical problem.
>
> Things like this could be done using DHTML and perhaps a batch script to add
> the necessary tags, but it would require a lot of overhead in bandwidth and
> loading time to link all of the technical words.
>
> Any comments?
>
> - Shawn


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