Feature request: "inspect link", "paste quote", "paste link"

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@hal.com)
Wed, 25 Jan 1995 23:03:20 +0100


Feature request of the day: I wish NetScape, Mosaic, et. al had the
feature available in lynx, the original NeXT browser, and I believe the
emacs w3 browser; that is, to inspect a link without traversing it.

In Netscape/Mosaic, if I see a link to the document that I want to
tell my friend about, I have to either traverse the link and copy the
address out of the "current document address" text field (which may
take more time than I'm interested in, or worse: if it's a postscript
document, this approach won't work at all) or I have to do "view source"
and copy the address out of there (which might be a relative link, in
which case I have to do some surgery to come up with the absolute link.)

Another nifty feature: I'd like to be able to select a range of text
in some funky way (say control-drag) so that when I paste it, I get a
bunch of "meta-information" (e.g. the stuff in the NetScape Document
Information dialog) with it -- maybe shift-control-drag gives me an
HTML version; suppose I select the string "You can use this page to
send us comments, feature requests, bug reports, and general
feedback." on the mcom request page. When I paste it, I want to get:

<blockquote>
<p> You can use this page to send us comments, feature
requests, bug reports, and general feedback.

<address>
<cite><a href="http://home.mcom.com/home/how-to-give-feedback.html">
Netscape: Give Us Feedback!</a></cite><br>
Thu Jan 12 04:48:17 1995<br>
info@mcom.com<br>
Copyright ) 1994 Netscape Communications Corporation.
</address>
</blockquote>

By the way... the ASHE editor is kinda neat: not rocket science, but
pretty nifty. I wish it had a more direct-manipulation interface for
making links. For example: select some text in a browser; highlight
some text in the ASHE window; "paste link". I'm sure some variation on
this could be hacked in in about an hour. With cooperation from
browsers (to support other X Selection targets besides STRING, like
URL and Last-Modified, and TITLE), it could be even nicer.

Dan