treora/quoteurl

Allow URLs to point to any text piece in a document

quoteurl's Issues

Scroll to highlight

When dereferencing a URL, the page should scroll to the highlighted text.

Whitespace pedantry

Whitespace in the text (including indentation in the source) is considered part of the quoted text and needlessly befouls the URL. Whitespace handling might also be the cause of issues with locating the quote (issue #3). Reducing any whitespace to a single space may make sense.

Besides, spaces turn into %20 when url-encoded, which is ugly too; converting them to + or something else may give more readable URLs.

Shorten long quotes

Quoting a longer text now creates huge URLs, which could easily be shortened while remaining uniquely resolvable. The most traditional and human-readable approach would be ellipsis: "ipsum dolor ... diam lectus.".

Possibly extra information could be added to increase robustness and verify the contents are correct. A hash of the string, or maybe just the length of the omitted part. I feel however that robustness to text modifications should be accomplished at a higher (document-)level, and making sure that the quote identifier was unambiguous in the first place is a matter that must be solved generally (issue #1; disambiguation could in this case be achieved by adding prefix/suffix as well as by removing less quoted words).

Locating quote often fails in Firefox

Fails on mobile browsers

Not sure what is different there.

Implement Web Annotation Selector to Fragements

It's already done...mostly. 😉
http://w3c.github.io/web-annotation/selector-note/#json-examples-converted-to-fragment-identifiers

Also, checkout @tilgovi's recent plnkr:
http://run.plnkr.co/plunks/FJibLnSRElKG3k5s5jH9/

As you highlight stuff it shows the various representations of the selection (one of which is a Web Annotation). If you (in a very recent Firefox at least) copy the text, click someplace else in the doc (to remove the select), and then "Ctrl + V"/paste it will reanchor the selection using the Web Annotation it stored in the clipboard.

Next up, imagine editors being smart enough to accept a Web Annotation paste and give you options for how you want to present the citation in your markup (with them keeping the Web Annotation data in RDFa). Pretty sure this is the sort of thing @csarven day dreams about also. 😸

Prevent polluting history

Each time selection changes the URL changes, and a new point is added to the browser history, so clicking back through history takes ages.

Disambiguate between quotes

When selected text appears multiple times, simply quoting the exact text is insufficient. Such a situation could be detected and acted upon while creating the URL. The TextQuoteSelector supports specifying a prefix and suffix text to disambiguate. Another approach is to combine the quote with different selector types; a TextPositionSelector would work, and noting the closest named anchor would also prevent some ambiguities.