159716 - bookmarking document positions or selections with Xpointer

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, enhancement)

Description

[Marcus S]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.1b) Gecko/20020721
BuildID:    2002072104

The context menu should allow for the creation of bookmarks that use Xpointer
anchors that refer to a selection, or, if no selection has been made, to the
current position of the cursor in the document ("Bookmark this selection",
"Bookmark this cursor position").

It should use element id's as much as possible, and when none are available, it
should simply use the child number addressing (at least that is, in my opinion,
the best approach with the current FIXptr implementation).

The mozdev project Annozilla may have some code implmented already that   has
this fuctionality -- although it is used for annotations, not bookmarks, but it
does appear to extract FIXptr expressions from a given selection. It should be a
very good place to start.

See 
<a
href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2001AprJun/att-0074/01-NOTE-FIXptr-20010425.htm">FIXptr</a>
http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-xpointer/
http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-element/
http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-framework/
http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-xmlns/

Comment 1

[Marcus S]

http://Annozilla.mozdev.org has much of the code done, really. Just check out
the following link to their CVS repository:

http://www.mozdev.org/source/browse/annozilla/src/content/annozilla/xpointer.js

That covers Xpointer creation from a location and from a selection (although I
think Annozilla has a more complete implementation of Xpointer than FIXptr).
What is really missing is the UI code for the context menus and such.

Comment 2

[Marcus S]

I have a simple test page that uses a modified version of xpointer.js from
Annozilla. I have managed to create a quick hack that, given a selection, it is
able to figure out the corresponding FIXptr expression (the Annozilla version
gives the corresponding XPath expression).

Should I just create an attachment? I am not sure if there is some protocol I
have to follow given the code is from Annozilla (even though it is under a
LGPL/GPL/MPL multi-license). 

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

See bug 103118

Comment 4

[Marcus S]

Well, the position is only one of the features of Xpointer. The other feature
(which can be very usefull when quoting or referencing other web pages) allows
for the addressing of _ranges_ of text, so that, for example, when following a
link, you will go to a certain page, at a certain position, AND the relevant
text will be highlighted.

Comment 5

[Chris Lyon]

*** Bug 162852 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Chris Lyon]

*** Bug 184877 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Heikki Toivonen (remove -bugzilla when emailing directly)]

You could also implement this with Mozilla's native XPointer support once bug
182323 is done.

Comment 8

[Stefan Borggraefe]

*** Bug 258205 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter "spam" on "guifeatures-nobody-20080610".