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The Internet Mozilla Software

Multiple-Target Hyperlinks for the Masses 278

Posted by timothy from the lobby-the-slash-coders-forever dept.
DukunSakti writes "For a long time people have talked about getting browser support for multilink feature. A multilink is a link that points to more than one targets. It's useful because many times a single target is not sufficient to describe a link. Wikipedia has numerous examples of acronyms and abbreviations that expand to more than one term. Well, I got sick of waiting, and so I wrote a plugin for the excellent Wiki application PmWiki that adds the multilink feature. This is fully supported under Mozilla Firefox, but only partially under Internet Explorer."
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Multiple-Target Hyperlinks for the Masses More

Multiple-Target Hyperlinks for the Masses

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  • Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:04PM (#13097302)
    This is yet another Slashdot submission by an author whose creation doesn't even come close to living up to his hype....

    In fact, it is seriously misleading. It's not a new innovation; it's just a DHTML popup menu, which many other people [google.com] have already implemented, and far better. Better how? Well, DukunSakti writes:
    This is fully supported under Mozilla Firefox, but only partially under Internet Explorer.
    No, actually with his code it's not supported at all under Internet Explorer. All it does is set the "title" attribute in the <a ...> tag so that the user gets a useless tooltip that is a list of a bunch of URLs which cannot be copied or edited or clicked on, so doesn't support going to any of the links at all. Instead, clicking on the link goes to a page to edit the links in the Wiki. Far more people read wikis than edit them; this should not be what happens. Yes, you can then click through to them from the editing page, but we need a second page just to be a raw list of URLs? WTF? And even under Firefox, where the "multi-target hyperlink" feature supposedly works, you just get a popup list of raw URLs. How are you supposed to know what each of them is and which you should go to? That's why a normal, well-implemented menu has actual text, not just raw URLs.

    Claiming that these are "multiple-target huperlinks for the masses," is quite inaccurate, considering that (unfortunately) 80%+ of people are still using Internet Explorer, and that for everyone else they are just presented as raw URLs. Essentially this makes this plugin completely useless. You can't ignore IE unless your wiki happens to be something like a Firefox support wiki. It's true that it's unfortunate that IE doesn't adhere to the web standards nearly as well as other browsers, but for now, the majority rules. There are plenty of web programmers who have found clever ways to do popup DHTML menus (which is all that this is) that actually work in both Firefox and IE; follow the link at the beginning of this post for a whole slew of them.
    • Amen brother, someone mod this up!
    • Not to mention the fact that the idea of a multilink really should be client side. A properly defined standard and a browser plugin would make this idea go much farther. And the links could properly downgrade if this was handled through a css property of some sort.
      • Not to mention the fact that the idea of a multilink really should be client side.

        There are client side things that load multiple pages...frames and popups. For that matter, if you want to open two links, you can always right click and select "open in new window" or "add to favorites".

        The primary use of multilink functionality will be to show seconary ads alongside primary ads.

      • No. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by wandernotlost ( 444769 ) <{moc.cigamliart} {ta} {todhsals}> on Monday July 18, 2005 @09:25PM (#13099986)
        A properly defined standard and a browser plugin would make this idea go much farther.

        Please no. Kill it now. Seriously, this is just another really bad idea that seems sort of neat that will make the web harder to use, like embedding your entire website in a flash animation. *shudder*

        Here's why: Do you really think that a disambiguation entry that takes up a whole page in wikipedia is better expressed by a little popup window that you won't even see unless you move your mouse over the link? It's just more information that won't make it into search engines, that will confuse users, and that will encourage designers to produce websites that are difficult to navigate. Did you notice that with all that fancy multi-link functionality, the author didn't manage to link to a single other source that thought this was a good idea? Really, folks, it's not that hard to just add a footnote or parenthetical remark (see also fake links [example.com]), and doing that is so much easier on the reader.

        Stop making it so damned hard to get useful information out of a website!

        Thank you.

        P.S. I'm not kidding, just take that idea out into your backyard and bury it deep under the ground where no one will find it. I know, you're thinking, "Ooh, but it would be kind of cool if it were just integrated into the browser and you'd just get a nice list of links to click on." No. Just think of all the information that you'd need to present to the user to help her decide which one to pick. It just doesn't work in a little popup. Here, I'll get the shovel.

    • Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses" (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Pxtl ( 151020 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:13PM (#13097407) Homepage
      Yeah, that was my reaction too: Oh - a drop down. Whee. I'm sure that a small list of wikizens love this news, but it's hardly a big mainstream thing. A better concept would be to work more in back-end approaches, like a more robust protocol than http - for example, URLs that include back-up sources for 404s, or swarmed p2p for websites. Then provide oss plug-ins for major browsers.
    • Scathing but useful critique. Sort of a moot point though, since the guy's site is already horked so nobody will be able to download the code anyway.
    • No, actually with his code it's not supported at all under Internet Explorer. All it does is set the "title" attribute in the tag so that the user gets a useless tooltip that is a list of a bunch of URLs which cannot be copied or edited or clicked on, so doesn't support going to any of the links at all.

      It doesn't even seem to work in Mozilla 1.7.5! (i.e. I get the same lame behavior.)

      You'd think with the wealth of info out there, this fellow would have figured out how to insert a cross-browser hidden and collapsed DIV that he can then reanimate later. i.e. Something like this:
      <div id="popup" style="display:hidden;"></div>
      <a href="#" onClick="clickLink(event, 'http: //www.google.com,http: //www.yahoo.com');">Search Engine</a>
      <script>
      function clickLink(e, urls)
      {
      var popup = document.getElementById("popup");
      var array = new Array();
      var loc = 0;

      if(!e) e = document.event; //IE support

      while(urls.indexOf(',', loc) >= 0)
      {
      array[array.length] = urls.substring(loc, urls.indexOf(',', loc));
      loc = urls.indexOf(',', loc) + 1;
      }

      for(var i=0; i<array.length; i++)
      {
      popup.innerHTML = "<div><a href="'+array[i]+'"></a></div>
      }

      popup.style.left = e.X+"px";
      popup.style.top = e.Y+"px";
      popup.display = "visible";
      }
      </script>
      I haven't tried the code above so there may be a few bugs, but the idea should be clear enough. It's really not that hard of a thing to implement. :-/

      P.S. Spaces inserted because Slashcode is trying to be "smart" by incorrectly autolinking the code.

    • Re:Neither "fish" nor "flesh" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ear1grey ( 697747 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:36PM (#13097645) Homepage
      For a long time people have talked about self promotion on Slashdot. Self promotion its like a press release and usually involves some pet project that would most likely dwindle quietly into obscurity, but instead, has a fleeting shimmering moment in which to be globally lambasted.

    • Re:Neither "multi-target" nor "for the masses" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sumbry ( 644145 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @05:44PM (#13098217) Homepage
      Well said. Ya know, this isn't complicated. When I first saw the headline, I figured multilink was something as simple as how you do selects and dropdown lists in HTML, e.g.

      MLINK
      OPTION="Site 1" VALUE="http://site1.com"
      OPTION="Site 2" VALUE="http://site2.com" /MLINK

      You could then basically extend the properties to be supported via JavaScript and CSS easily by using the same naming convention.

      Once that's done, start by adding a plugin to one widely used browser and see if others like it and use it. If they do, then more and more people will jump onboard and help it spread.

      But it doesn't have to be complicated! I can't stand that so many geeks have a tendency to over-engineer and overthink everything!

      The icing on the cake though was RTFA and discovering that if you used IE you should switch to Firefox and while you're at it switch operating systems. Yes, I am going to throw away tons of my time just so that I can get multiple links in my browser.
    • MY question is why you would want to code something like this in the first place. It's a great idea on one level and on the second...... Yeah, I want nineteen windows of spam spawning when I accidentally click on a link. Really I do. But I know I would get them eventually if I installed something like this. So why make it standard? Why even try? If you can't explain what you're linking to, then perhaps it's not the technology that's the problem, and rather the author of whatever needs to be linked t
    • My only thoughts is he probably just wrote the API for the wiki rather then wait for someone else to write it. I'm fairly certain he wasn't intending to claim he made a new internet thingie(tm).

      That's really the only way it doesn't sound absurd. Also, it's best to assume the slashdot text is misleading and/or incorrect. (I like slash, I pay for slash, but I know it has faults)

      On a side note, there are tons of working dhtml pop up menus that do the job for both browsers and sometimes opera.

  • Multiple first post (Score:5, Funny)

    by huge ( 52607 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:05PM (#13097319)

    Next: Slashdot featuring multiple first post.

    • Re:Multiple first post (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:14PM (#13097416)
      > Next: Slashdot featuring multiple first post.

      And for our next attraction, a little DHTML hack to make each Slashdot story pop up the URLs to all its duplicates!

      Quoth the author:

      It's useful because many times a single target is not sufficient to describe a link. Wikipedia has numerous examples of acronyms and abbreviations that expand to more than one term.

      WTF? Am I getting cynical, or are these "multilinks" the least-useful thing I've ever seen?

      To use the poster's example, OCP can for "Omni Consumer Products", but can also stand for "Oracle Certified Partner". If you're writing a review of the movie Robocop, and you can't be bothered to link to the page that defines it as "Omni Consumer Products", I probably don't want to read any further.

      Context-sensitivity is a good thing.

      • Re:Multiple first post (Score:5, Interesting)

        by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:34PM (#13097627) Homepage Journal
        For most links, a single references is all that's needed. However, for a site like Wikipedia, a lot of links take you to a disambiguation page, which links to different entries for different meanings of a word.

        Also, for a reference site like Wikipedia, where there are a lot of links sprinkled throughout an article, would it be nice to have links to Palace [wikipedia.org] and Westminster [wikipedia.org] included in the link to Palace of Westminster [wikipedia.org]?

        • Re:Multiple first post (Score:5, Informative)

          by moonbender ( 547943 ) <moonbenderNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday July 18, 2005 @05:12PM (#13097969)
          Regarding the disambiguation pages, that is exactly the example the original poster referred to: on a Wikipedia page, linking to a disambiguation page is usually not the right thing, instead you want to link to the actual page relevant to the article. That is, on a page on chemistry, you might want to link to Atomic orbital while on a page on electronic music you might want to link to Orbital (band). In neither case you should link to Orbital, which is a disambiguation page, or "multi-link" to all of them because the band Orbital isn't really relevant in the context of chemistry. This is what the original poster refers to as context sensitivity.
      • Come on, man, how can you not see the usefullness in this? Anytime you have a website that is serving the purpose of being a frontend to a big cross-linked database, like pretty much any kind of Wiki, you're going to run into keywords that can link to more then one thing. I agree that context sensativity is great, and a fitting technology for this kind of situtation. However, I think that it should be used to effect the order of displayed multiple links. So that you'd still get a little pop-up list, but
        • No, there's no real reason for this to exist except in things that most people would consider to be indices. For example, an index of abbreviations could use this. Even then, a better organization would be for the abbreviation to appear with various contextual variants below it, indented, with links to the pages where the term appears in that context.

          The correct destination for a link should almost -always- be obvious from its context. In fact, a proper content organization system should inherently emb

  • small time story (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SolusSD ( 680489 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:07PM (#13097333) Homepage
    this sure is a small time story for a website like slashdot. can i post up little odd-end hacks i've created? ;)

  • I like the old style (Score:5, Funny)

    by cybersaga ( 451046 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:07PM (#13097339) Homepage
    I'd [slashdot.org] rather [slashdot.org] use [slashdot.org] the [slashdot.org] old [slashdot.org] way [slashdot.org] of [slashdot.org] linking [slashdot.org] multiple [slashdot.org] pages [slashdot.org].

  • That's great (Score:5, Funny)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:07PM (#13097344) Homepage Journal
    Now /. readers will be able to /. not just one website with a single click, but many websites also with a single click.

    And BTW, be careful of Jeff Bezos coming right after you for this obvious - Single Click Amazon IP violation.

  • Multiple-Target Hyperlinks for the Spammers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by intmainvoid ( 109559 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:11PM (#13097380)
    From the comments above it looks like this doesn't really do what it say, but just as well. It'd take spammers/porn site webmasters about 2 seconds to have us opening 500 windows with a single misplaced click.
    • Yeah, it doesn't open up more than one URL with a single click. It shows a menu of URLs with a mouseover.

      In fact, one of the annoying things about it is that you can't simply click on the link. You have to hover over it, then mouse down to the link you want, then click. If you try and just click on the link you end up clicking on some useless menu title. It would be nicer if you could use it as a regular link - click on it once and it takes you to the default URL - but hover and get more options.

  • It doesn't have to be that complicated (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kainaw ( 676073 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:12PM (#13097399) Homepage Journal
    While this is cute, I wrote a highly similar script in JavaScript. It takes one button and expands it out (like flower petals) into multiple buttons. http://shaunwagner.com/projects/js/flowerButton.ht ml [shaunwagner.com]

    As you can see fron the JavaScript, it is actually a rather simple task to position the buttons in a circle or in a simple box as this article's example does.
    • Your moving navigation bar is really, really distracting.

      href="javascript:..." is almost universally a bad idea.

      Other than that, that's a really neat idea. How well does it play with JS-disabled browsers?
    • While this is cute, I wrote a highly similar script in JavaScript. It takes one button and expands it out (like flower petals) into multiple buttons.

      While looking cool, if someone has JavaScript disabled, all those fancy links become unreachable and unusable.
    • OK, interesting - but how do you get it to go back to normal?

      Here's what happened to me on your site:

      You click on it, read the links, then decide that you don't want to go to any of them. Now you have a bunch of text (that you don't want) obscuring part of the page and making it impossible to read. The only way I could think of to get rid of them was to click on another "multi-link" (which means just obscuring a different part of the page), or to reload (which wastes bandwidth and time.)

      Even worse - if
    • Too many clicks. I actually would have preferred if the 'petals' on your links came up on rollover and disappeared once the mouse is out of the circumference of the popup links. Or did it become too complicated to implement for you? But 'too complex to implement' is not excuse if you are bothering in the first place to come up with something that will supposedely improve user experience, no?

      • If he had used href='#' and onClick instead, it would simply be an issue of doing onMouseOver instead. However, I don't know that that's a very good idea, because personally I can't stand it when random things pop up and obscure parts of the screen just because I accidentally moved my mouse over them. To each his own I guess.

    • It takes one button and expands it out (like flower petals) into multiple buttons.

      You seem to have independently discovered or reinvented the pie menu [piemenu.com], also known as the circle menu [cornell.edu] or radial context menu [radialthinking.de].

      There are assorted demos here [piemenu.com]

      Despite some evidence that pie menus are easier to use than more common schemes, they've never caught on. It might be because they are not as compact as other types and so page designers trade off some usability to make better use of screen space. Also, they don't scale

      • The most useful pie menu I've ever seen was in the Xbox version of Counter-Strike. You could very quickly and easily buy your equipment in a flash... the 'slices' of the pie were all labelled, and the control device (the analog stick) already moved in a circular fashion to start with.

        Neverwinter Nights on the PC, however, has the worst pie menu implementation I've ever seen. The 'slices' are only labelled with obscure icons, and the mouse isn't really suited for moving in a circular fashion, at least not
    • Damn, but the Desktop CSS scheme on that site is scary. Cool, but it takes a seriously disturbed mind to do all that with CSS and Javascript:)
    • Neat! You pretty much pwned the guy in the article. Especially with the text version.

      However, being a User Interface Nazi I have to add some constructive critcism. The button itself gives no indication that it is a clickable button. It just looks like a radio button. The text version looked a little hackish but it was pretty apparent what might happen if you clicked on one of the text links after it exploded into them.

      Perhaps a better version would be to combine the two: text immediately followed by

  • Misleading (Score:4, Insightful)

    by alfrin ( 858861 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:14PM (#13097420)
    The article Title + Summary make it seem like this guy has used some new sort of mark up previously untapped. Not only has it been done but its just DHTML built into a Wiki like context. Come on, this isn't a site for little nifty hacks, its for news.
    • I agree. I've been waiting for years for a standard to be developed wherein I could drop this markup in:



      and the browser would either show a selection menu of some kind on click or pop multiple tabs (newer compatible browsers) or ignore all except the last href/alt pair (older incompatible browsers). No javascript, no dhtml, just:

      x
      ----
      xxx
      yyy
      zzz

      alas, that would be useful, so it will never happen. heh.
      • Duh, should have previewed...

        the markup should have showed a standard 'a' tag, with one alt attribute and multiple href attributes.

        although technically it should have been one alt, one href, and a slew of althref attributes (that older browsers would just ignore).
    • OMFG he should totally patent this and license it to Amazon. Imagine, One-click-to-buy-it-all! and he can require webmasters who want to use any multi-linking type technology to pay fees, just like UNISYS did for GIFs. Man, UNISYS is such a great company, loved by all, making money hand over fist on their GIF patents.
    • Come on, this isn't a site for little nifty hacks, its for news.

      It is? Now that's news to me. I always thought that the "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" bit was meant ironically. Perhaps someone should inform the editors.
    • this isn't a site for little nifty hacks

      Fortunately, this hack isn't even nifty, so you haven't really disqualified it. How about: This isn't a site for boring posers, it's a site for stuff that matters.

  • Not to be negative, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by deemaunik ( 699970 ) <ian,shepherd&gmail,com> on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:15PM (#13097430)
    Does anyone else see the opportunity for abuse with this? Such as the dreaded autopopup when you close a window, and endless loops of crap?

  • Not IE compatible? Congrats, 80% ignores you. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jleq ( 766550 ) * <[jleq96] [at] [gmail.com]> on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:21PM (#13097490)
    I may not like Internet Explorer, but it's just plain imprudent to *not* support it.
    My multilink plugin code adds full support for this feature to Firefox browsers, but only partially to any recent versions of Internet Explorer due to its CSS implementation shortcomings (full support may be upcoming if there is any users demand)
    Uhhh... try 80% of all internet users? We're not going to get the average 'net user to switch to Firefox by pissing him/her off with incompatibilities. What happens when a media item that I want to watch is only available for realplayer? I don't watch it.
    • Honestly, the only way IE will come up to standards is if web developers stop intentionally writing work arounds for it. I mean, what incentive is there for standards adherance when your incompatibility with standards is the status quo?

      • Thank you. Honestly, are we supposed to reward Microsoft for making a non-standards-compliant browser by all doing extra work to make websites work with IE, basically spending our own time and money deliberately helping IE become even further entrenched? That's crazy. I say fsck it - code to standards, let it break on IE, and let MS either fix their browser or fall behind. If that means we "force" customers to use a standards-compliant browser to use the Web, well, that doesn't sound like such a bad thing t

  • Firefox already supports multi-link bookmarks (Score:4, Informative)

    by jeddak ( 12628 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:26PM (#13097544)
    ...in the Home Page URL in Preferences (or Options, depending on your OS), you can specify a multi-URL home page. The multi-URL format used is just pipe-delimited URLs (e.g. URL1|Url2|URL3...etc.)

    Each URL is then opened in a separate tab. Very nice. More universal support for multi-links would be great.

  • Better done in Markup (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kalidasa ( 577403 ) * on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:30PM (#13097581) Journal
    What we need is to add multilinking to XHTML, and get Mozilla, Safari, and IE to support it.

    [a type='multilink' href='http://www.slashdot.org/defaultlinkfornon multilinkbrowsers']

    [linkoption href='http://www.slashdot.org/firstlink' title='This is the first link']

    [linkoption href='http://www.slashdot.org/secondlink' title='This is the second link']

    [linkoption href='http://www.slashdot.org/thirdlink' title='This is the third link']

    This is the text inside the link

    [/a]

    and have this appear as a small dropdown list below the link when you click the link.

    • <style>
      div.multilink {
      height: 1em;
      }

      div.multilink:hover {
      height: auto;
      }

      div.multilink:first-child {
      text-decoration: underline;
      }

      div.multilink a {
      display: block;
      }
      </style>
      <div class="multilink">Example.com
      <a href="http://www.example.com">direct link to example.com site</a>
      <a href="http://www.example.com.nyud.net:8090">Coral i zed example.com link</a>
      </div>

      ???

  • Great, now instead of opening one pop-up (Score:4, Insightful)

    by melted ( 227442 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:37PM (#13097654) Homepage
    Great, now instead of opening one pop-up a link will be able to open a hundred. Just what we need.
    • Uh, that's already possible with popups now. This is more about getting talk about making a standardized way of doing multilink/menu type things. It's not useful to the internet at large as-is, but there are already people posting who have good ideas as to how to do this well.

  • I've seen these before... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jim_v2000 ( 818799 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @04:47PM (#13097727)
    I believe they're more commonly referred to as "Menus".
  • Click on a multilink, you get a new browser window, and each of the targets are in a separate tab. That's how I would like to use it, at least. Should be trivial in javascript.

  • Add whatever support you want, but make sure I can turn it off so I don't click on a link to get 50,000 other advertizement pages.

    I can see the advantages of this right away. I can also see the problems this will cause. I choose not to participate.

  • And I have a multi-link to my home page.

    A page for Leanne, ...
    a page for Thomas, ...
    a page for Christy, ...
    a page for (shuddering) JIM,

    Hold on, I'm not done switching into my 12 different personalities...

    a page for ...

  • Dear editors... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jlarocco ( 851450 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @05:11PM (#13097946) Homepage

    Dear editors:
    If Donald Knuth, Linus Torvalds, or some other famous developer submits an article about something cool they're making, people might care. But nobody cares about some dumbass' broken firefox plugin. The advertisements here are supposed to be the banner ads, not the articles.
    Thank you.

  • This is useless. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by clandestine_nova ( 620998 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @05:18PM (#13098007)
    Seriously, is it *that* slow of a news day? This hack is neither well-implemented nor does it have any real use. The example the author mentioned doesn't even make sense, because links are not, and never were, supposed to work like that - they don't make sense for multiple targets, as that is a page design decision, not a DOM decision. This so-called multi-linking is silly, semantically nonsensical, and simply adds bloat to otherwise clear pages.
  • Just like the so-called 'fancy radio buttons' article from last week, this is yet another useless solution to an already solved problem.

    Simple solution:
    A list of links. Generally a bulleted list.

    The problem with both this multilink thing, and the fancy form buttons, is that they are NOT accessible to anyone using a screen-reader, older browsers, lynx, and sometimes keyboard navigation.

    I can't see the code in action, but my guess is that you need a mouse, and to be able to 'see' the menu in order for it

  • Mod Points (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ear1grey ( 697747 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @05:25PM (#13098059) Homepage
    How timely, I have mod points: can someone please invent (and then shamelessly self-promote) a plugin that lets me mod the parent story down?
  • Multiple links are not sufficient to point to a single target. Often there are several words highlighted in a sentence, any of which have an equal chance of being "the article" due to the hyperlinking of articles and other common words. I might want to read all of them for context, but I might not be interested in the sidetracks the summarizer thinks are relevant or funny.

  • Once again.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by im_thatoneguy ( 819432 )
    Once again Open Source proponents give Microsoft Users the Big Finger. Just because they can. "...if there is demand..." I don't know I would call more than 80% of the internet populace sufficient demand to implement a very small nugget of code to give full functionality. This doesn't exactly look like a breakthrough code snippet anyways, The idea of a drop down box on hover for several options is clever but doesn't really involve more than about 15 lines of CSS, plus another 15 for IE support, matter
  • *shudders at the thought of a link containg both Goatse and Tubgirl*

  • In-browser function (Score:5, Interesting)

    by phorm ( 591458 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @06:09PM (#13098396) Journal
    First, for the obvious: it's not a multi-target hyperlink, it's a dropdown. However, the idea of dropdown-select style hyperlink isn't a bad one... perhaps something that could be included in an HTML spec for the future.

    At first though, I thought that this would be for a hyperlink that opens multiple locations (best-served with tabs). This would have the potential to be really annoying in the case of popup sites or if some bozo linkbombs you, but with most browsers in the future supporting tabs it does have promise. Simply have the link open multiple tabs, and then have a browser-setting that can determine how many tabs can be opened by a single link, or give a warning if over the limit.

    For example, you could have a "news" link that opens several news pages, or something of the like. This can also likely be accomplished with JavaScript (though I've never tried JS /w tabs, is there a spec)... but it would be a neat concept for future features to fully integrate the power of tabbed browsing.
  • ...their mouse only has one button.

  • WHY? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by venomkid ( 624425 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @06:56PM (#13098817)
    Why would anyone put two URLs under a single link? Isn't it the point of a link to be an abstracted method of invoking a URL, with link text for context? You're not supposed to *see* the URL.

    This method just pops up a bunch of confusing as hell URLs whenever you mouse over a link without any kind of description. What about the massively cryptic URLs that e-commerce sites create. How am I supposed to pick from a list of those?

    I think this entire idea is based on bad assumptions.

    (Not to mention that the fancy gradient feature on the list of choices darkens some of the links to near unreadability.)

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