[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and Wiktionary

[Fennec Foxen]

On Fri, 21 May 2004 17:49:49 -0700, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> > Perhaps a question at the side with "Click here if there is a word you
> > want to look up in Wiktionary".  Clicking would open a question mark
> > cursor that could be positioned over the problem word and clicked.
> That sounds like a great idea to me, if there's a reasonable way to
> implement something like that (Javascript?).

That specific implementation sounds iffy. If I were to go about doing
this (in any web page) I think the following procedure would be
needed:
* have the link set some sort of Java-script variable (wiktClick=true)
and perhaps adjust the stylesheet so the cursor would become a Help
cursor
* set the word in its own private <span> or something with an
onMouseClick event which calls a function with its self as an argument
which would load up the relevant page if clicked when wiktClick was
on.

The problem would be that, from what I know of JavaScript in HTML, you
would need an event handler for EVERY SINGLE WORD. This could easily
quadruple the size of the HTML pages. So I don' t think this
implementation would work per se.

What might be better is some sort of new syntax. Perhaps something like:
<<fancyword>>
Then you could have a link which could toggle hilighting for these
words and a JavaScript handler for sending people to Wiktionary when
it was toggled.