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Show HN: Pinpointer – A Firefox extension to share links to page elements

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Re: Show HN: Pinpointer – A Firefox extension to share links to page elements

#21

Post by karanlyons »

Rumperuu wrote: post #2

I wanted to try making a browser extension and it seemed weird to me that there didn't seem to exist any means of linking to specific elements on a web page if they hadn't been given IDs to make a fragment identifier out of, so I made this. You select a page element and generate a link, which you can then share. For someone without the extension, the link will work as normal and just take them to the page, but someon…

You might want to take a look at https://github.com/karanlyons/pinpoint to see if there's anything there you want to grab, especially around the selector creation: https://github.com/karanlyons/pinpoint/blob/4b2ec192c0400f26...

Re: Show HN: Pinpointer – A Firefox extension to share links to page elements

#22

Post by idbehold »

Rumperuu wrote: post #6
dmortin wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should post such a generated link here as an example, so people can immediately try it by clicking on it.

Good point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela#aHRtbCA%2BIGJvZ... (I wasn't kidding about needing to shorten those links.)

Would an XPath work for this? Seems like that would be easiest considering Firefox already has built-in support for getting the XPath from an element on the page.

Re: Show HN: Pinpointer – A Firefox extension to share links to page elements

#23

Post by ChrisGranger »

Rumperuu wrote: post #9
severine wrote: post #5

I have installed it and it doesn't work. In the Mozilla addons page it just says " Pinpointer error ". In this HN page, it prompts me to select and click a green button, but fails to do anything. It's an interesting concept, keep going! edit: Firefox 62.0b9 (32-bit) in up-to-date Ubuntu 16.04, with uMatrix and other extensions running.

As far as I can tell the Mozilla addons page doesn't like addons running on it. I'll add a more explanatory error message though. I hadn't thought to test it on HN, so that's intriguing. I'll look into it, but I'd presume it's due to some sort of quirky DOM structure.

There's an about:config entry regarding this.

extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains

Re: Show HN: Pinpointer – A Firefox extension to share links to page elements

#24

Post by iza »

insomniacity wrote: post #4

"It requires your permission to: Access your data for all web sites" I wish Firefox had a permission along the lines of 'Access all data from pages on which I activate the extension', which is presumably all this would need.

There is the "activeTab" permission: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/ma...

Re: Show HN: Pinpointer – A Firefox extension to share links to page elements

#25

Post by Rumperuu »

karanlyons wrote: post #21
Rumperuu wrote: post #2

I wanted to try making a browser extension and it seemed weird to me that there didn't seem to exist any means of linking to specific elements on a web page if they hadn't been given IDs to make a fragment identifier out of, so I made this. You select a page element and generate a link, which you can then share. For someone without the extension, the link will work as normal and just take them to the page, but someon…

You might want to take a look at https://github.com/karanlyons/pinpoint to see if there's anything there you want to grab, especially around the selector creation: https://github.com/karanlyons/pinpoint/blob/4b2ec192c0400f26...

This is really interesting, I'm not sure how I didn't find it before. What I'd like to know is whatever happened to the CSS-selectors-as-fragment-identifiers movement and why it didn't take off. The proposal that inspired that extension[1] was written by Simon St.Laurent and Eric Mayer, so it's not like it was a fringe thing, and they co-chaired a W3C Working Group on the topic[2], but it apparently never published any reports and the last recorded activity was in Jan 2013. Anyone know what happened?

[1] http://simonstl.com/articles/cssFragID.html

[2] https://www.w3.org/community/cssselfrags/

Re: Show HN: Pinpointer – A Firefox extension to share links to page elements

#26

Post by Rumperuu »

iza wrote: post #24
insomniacity wrote: post #4

"It requires your permission to: Access your data for all web sites" I wish Firefox had a permission along the lines of 'Access all data from pages on which I activate the extension', which is presumably all this would need.

There is the "activeTab" permission: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/ma...

It looks like that can only be triggered if the user interacts with the extension in some way. Presumably, then, it won't work if there's a script that should run on each page load.

EDIT: I had a look at the manifest.json[1], and it turns out that's the only permission I've requested. Not sure why Firefox says I'm asking for everything and the kitchen sink.

[1] https://github.com/Rumperuu/Pinpointer/blob/master/manifest....

Re: Show HN: Pinpointer – A Firefox extension to share links to page elements

#27

Post by Izkata »

Rumperuu wrote: post #2

I wanted to try making a browser extension and it seemed weird to me that there didn't seem to exist any means of linking to specific elements on a web page if they hadn't been given IDs to make a fragment identifier out of, so I made this. You select a page element and generate a link, which you can then share. For someone without the extension, the link will work as normal and just take them to the page, but someon…

> there didn't seem to exist any means of linking to specific elements on a web page if they hadn't been given IDs to make a fragment identifier out of

There's archive sites that do this, without a browser extension, and since it's an archive site instead of a live page, the content won't change underneath the target: http://archive.is/RUyWM#selection-253.74-253.223

Re: Show HN: Pinpointer – A Firefox extension to share links to page elements

#28

Post by karanlyons »

Rumperuu wrote: post #25
karanlyons wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to take a look at https://github.com/karanlyons/pinpoint to see if there's anything there you want to grab, especially around the selector creation: https://github.com/karanlyons/pinpoint/blob/4b2ec192c0400f26...

This is really interesting, I'm not sure how I didn't find it before. What I'd like to know is whatever happened to the CSS-selectors-as-fragment-identifiers movement and why it didn't take off. The proposal that inspired that extension[1] was written by Simon St.Laurent and Eric Mayer, so it's not like it was a fringe thing, and they co-chaired a W3C Working Group on the topic[2], but it apparently never published a…

Yeah, I dunno why it never took off, though Meyer was one of the few to star the repo, so I thought that was nice. I was never able to get much traction on my extension either, though some people did port it to every browser, which was also nice.

I think this is just one of those problems that's hard to sell to people.

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