Hey all,
I wanted to change the "cite" extension to have some extra functionality.
As citations have gotten more common, I've noticed an emerging use case where people will copy and paste text from wikipedia to HTML-enabled tools such as email clients or IM clients to share information. Unfortunately, those citation links just link to anchors on the page and don't provide anything useful when copied/pasted. Appending the full page's URL to those links would take like 20 seconds, make them functional, but would add extra markup to every page. Anyone have any other good reasons why we shouldn't do this?
-Nimish
On 03/17/2010 08:48 PM, Nimish Gautam wrote:
Hey all,
I wanted to change the "cite" extension to have some extra functionality.
As citations have gotten more common, I've noticed an emerging use case where people will copy and paste text from wikipedia to HTML-enabled tools such as email clients or IM clients to share information. Unfortunately, those citation links just link to anchors on the page and don't provide anything useful when copied/pasted. Appending the full page's URL to those links would take like 20 seconds, make them functional, but would add extra markup to every page. Anyone have any other good reasons why we shouldn't do this?
When viewing a page through a redirect, the citation link would point to a different page causing a page load when clicked. When viewing through https://secure.wikimedia.org/ it would point to a different site, causing the user to leave the secure site when clicked.
Conrad
Conrad Irwin wrote:
On 03/17/2010 08:48 PM, Nimish Gautam wrote:
As citations have gotten more common, I've noticed an emerging use case where people will copy and paste text from wikipedia to HTML-enabled tools such as email clients or IM clients to share information. Unfortunately, those citation links just link to anchors on the page and don't provide anything useful when copied/pasted. Appending the full page's URL to those links would take like 20 seconds, make them functional, but would add extra markup to every page. Anyone have any other good reasons why we shouldn't do this?
When viewing a page through a redirect, the citation link would point to a different page causing a page load when clicked. When viewing through https://secure.wikimedia.org/ it would point to a different site, causing the user to leave the secure site when clicked.
I'm not sure about the former (I don't remember how the parser cache handles redirects), but the latter would certainly not be true -- the secure server does not share cached pages with the regular ones. In fact, this is easy enough to demonstrate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ilmari_Karonen/sandbox/fullurl https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/User:Ilmari_Karonen/sandbox/f...
(Ps. Sorry for posting so late in this old thread; I'm reading old posts to catch up and just wanted to correct this detail.)
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 20:48, Nimish Gautam ngautam@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hey all,
I wanted to change the "cite" extension to have some extra functionality.
As citations have gotten more common, I've noticed an emerging use case where people will copy and paste text from wikipedia to HTML-enabled tools such as email clients or IM clients to share information. Unfortunately, those citation links just link to anchors on the page and don't provide anything useful when copied/pasted. Appending the full page's URL to those links would take like 20 seconds, make them functional, but would add extra markup to every page. Anyone have any other good reasons why we shouldn't do this?
As Conrad pointed out using non-absolute URLs like this is by design and not doing so would break other functionality.
What browser are you using and how are you copy-pasting the HTML from the browser to your E-Mail/IM programs? If it's some feature where you highlight a text on the page and the browser automatically fetches the underlying HTML then not resolving anchor links on the page sounds like a bug in that browser.
Are are you just viewing the source of the page and copy/pasting snippets from there?
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