Webby thoughts, most about around interesting applications of ecmascript in relation to other open web standards. I live in Mountain View, California, and spend some of my spare time co-maintaining Greasemonkey together with Anthony Lieuallen.
var path, node, hash = decodeURIComponent( location.hash||'' );
if( (path = /^#xpath:(.+)/.exec( hash )) &&
(node = $X( path[1] )) )
node.scrollIntoView();
function $X( xpath ) {
return document.evaluate( xpath, document, null, 0, null ).iterateNext();
}
Limited HTML (such as <b>, <i>, <a>) is supported. (All comments are moderated by me amd rel=nofollow gets added to links -- to deter and weed out monetized spam.)
I would prefer not to have to do this as much as you do. Comments straying too far off the post topic often lost due to attention dilution.
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.
Hi, I really like the idea.
ReplyDeleteI've often thought that it'd be nice if there was some standard way of mixing xpath into a uri to make it point to a specific element in a document - it would be especially useful in Piggbank/Solvent type situations. Is it a valid uri, and is it distinguishable from a url that might happen to have that fragment identifier?
It's a valid uri, and in theory, you could say it's an invalid anchor, as (at least according to the XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD) /, for instance, is not a valid part of an <a name=""> anchor name attribute. Ergo: yes.
ReplyDeleteMore interestingly though, it's very, very unlikely people would use such anchors themselves, except perhaps as inspired by this post. And then, more likely for programmatic purposes IMO.
Please take a look at the W3C’s XPointer (supported in Firefox), and don’t invent something that is custom :).
ReplyDeleteI'll happily err on the side of pragmatism; the XPointer framework seems to have stuck its head in the clouds in not being defined neother for non-XML doctypes nor non-well-formed documents, and messy HTML being the norm on the web today, I don't see how XPointer would be the more useful approach at present. Quote:
ReplyDelete"The [XPointer] framework is intended to be used as a basis for fragment identifiers for any resource whose Internet media type is one of text/xml, application/xml, text/xml-external-parsed-entity, or application/xml-external-parsed-entity."
The XPath bookmarks defined above quite purposefully neither comply with nor water out the XPointer standard, as they would if they did.
Question back: could you give an XPointer example link that Firefox supports and manages to resolve, or any more detail of what you mean by "supports", in summary or reference? this XPointer link does not seem to be supported by my Firefox in any useful fashion, anyway. That page is arguably "just" well-formed application/xhtml+xml though, so it might not be a proper example of anything but how limiting the XPointer framework scope is (when really anally interpreted by the letter, anyway).