1283529 - Expose cite in quote and mod context menus

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Menus, enhancement)

Description

[Ian Moody [:Kwan] (UTC+1)]

Similar to bug 877453, we don't currently expose the cite attribute of HTMLQuote and HTMLMod elements.

Patch incoming.

Comment 1

[Ian Moody [:Kwan] (UTC+1)]

Attachment: Bug 1283529 - Make the cite attribute of HTMLQuote/ModElements reachable via the context menu

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/61560/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/61560/

Comment 2

[Ian Moody [:Kwan] (UTC+1)]

Attachment: Bug 1283529 - Add tests for new View Citation context menu item

Also remove errant </embed>

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/61562/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/61562/

Comment 3

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

I don't think we should make this change in Firefox, for a few reasons:

* Features like this have poor discoverability. @cite isn't likely to be widely used, and so on the rare occasions it is people are unlikely to know or find it in a context menu.

* The spec indicates this really isn't an attribute meant for the end-user:

  https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#attr-blockquote-cite
  https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#attr-mod-cite


  "User agents may allow users to follow such citation links, but they are
   primarily intended for private use (e.g., by server-side scripts collecting
   statistics about a site's use of quotations), not for readers."

* This isn't supported by other browsers (tested in Canary, Safari, Edge, and IE).

* The longdesc context menu was a messy result of a politicized and abusive situation, and I'm really not interested in furthering that line of feature.


So, this is the kind of feature that's really best served by being implemented as an extension. Sorry that there was no opportunity to offer this feedback before you wrote the patch, but it should be easy to port that work to an addon.

Comment 4

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Comment on attachment 8766828 [details]
Bug 1283529 - Add tests for new View Citation context menu item

https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/61562/#review59444

Comment 5

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Comment on attachment 8766827 [details]
Bug 1283529 - Make the cite attribute of HTMLQuote/ModElements reachable via the context menu

https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/61560/#review59446

Comment 6

[Ian Moody [:Kwan] (UTC+1)]

(In reply to Justin Dolske [:Dolske] from comment #3)
> So, this is the kind of feature that's really best served by being
> implemented as an extension. Sorry that there was no opportunity to offer
> this feedback before you wrote the patch, but it should be easy to port that
> work to an addon.

No problem, thanks for looking anyway!

Comment 7

[Ian Moody [:Kwan] (UTC+1)]

As a matter of historical record, I did end up making an extension (web extension these days) to accomplish this, which can be found at:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/context-cite-link/

I expect zero users ;)