Hyper-Anchor

A look at another extension by the folks who brought us Wired-Marker. Hyper-Anchor is similar, but lighter weight than Wired-Marker.

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.

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