http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20070124/ - "page abstracts for Yahoo" - what is this file?
[... snip ...]
<title>Wikipedia: April</title> <url>http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/April</url> <abstract>April is the fourth month of the year with 30 days. The name April comes from that Latin word aperire which means "to open".
</abstract>
Just out of curiosity, how is that abstract generated, and could it be generated quickly on the fly?
The reason I ask is that sometimes I'm reading an article, and see a linked term, and ask "What's that?". A lot of the time, I don't particularly need or want the full explanation - a quick two or three sentence summary would do fine.
In such a situation, hovering a mouse cursor over the link, and having some JavaScript fire off to fetch the two or three sentence abstract, which was then shown in a tooltip, could be ideal.
All the best, Nick.