Back in October I wrote about Linkpad, a feature that existed in Netscape’s Netscape 9 browser. Since then I’ve done a lot of work on bookStack and Netscape has discontinued their browser.
Today it’s my pleasure to let you know that you now have an alternative to bookStack in Firefox. The Netscape folks have released Linkpad for Firefox (in the Mozilla.org addons sandbox).
It’s compact and more polished than bookStack (both inside and out no doubt), but has some differences in features and interface. Overall I think it’s worth looking at if you want this kind of extension.
-Adam
Hyper-Anchor (Japanese only at the moment, but I suspect the English page will be here when they get it ready) is a lot like its big sibling I wrote about last month, Wired-Marker.
Once again by the BITS Co., Ltd. bioInformational company, it lacks some of the features of Wired-Marker, but that’s the idea, really. It’s supposed to be a slimmed-down version for daily use. You select some text in a page, and bookmark it. Simple, simple.
It’s available in the Mozilla.org addons sandbox, as well as the official site.
The only big stumbling block for both extensions is something they have no control over. That is the nature of parsing a document that may change or may be incorrect. They use XPath to find, store, and retrieve the document-specific location of an item. If the document is malformed and badly structured, or possibly if the structure is too dynamic, it will not reliably locate the correct part (”node”) of the document to anchor to.
The fact of the matter is there is not really a good way to deal with that. It should be accepted as a limitation of the current web. But spreading awareness of this kind of software and increasing its common usage does help. As more people use this kind of software on pages it will increase the awareness of web designers and web programmers. They will realize “we’re breaking an important tool for our page,” just as they currently do with CSS, and they will optimize their page to have good structure.
Dear Scientology*,
Please go away.
*xenu.net is a site devoted to exposing the idiots known as the Church of Scientology.
The apparent victory for the Blu-ray is a farce. They know the market is moving away from proprietary formats and portable media, so there has been anti-competitive, under the table agreements to end the fight between HD-DVD & Blu-ray.
The idea is that the adoption rates of either hasn’t been what was expected, and that without entrenching that technology soon enough they would risk not having consumers buying their cheap plastic discs for the next ten years.
It’s okay, though. As the network market grows, it will push for increased infrastructure and there isn’t a requirement for these expensive players. They’ll skim some profits for now, but those will continue to diminish as the physical sale of music has.
I’ve decided to host bookStack on Google Code.
The page here will remain, but some of the features on a project host are worth it. Among these are the wiki which will serve for better documentation, and eventually the bug tracker and subversion repository.
The page here will remain as is for now, as I continue to work on getting that site up to speed. After that the page here will probably serve for other purposes related to bookStack.