1651121 - Find: search for link texts only

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Toolkit :: Find Toolbar, enhancement)

Description

[Nick Levinson]

Where Find gets many matches but I only need one that's a link text, I'd like it to be easier to find.

I use Find to find a string. In particular, I'm looking for an instance where the string is a link text. If I were not using Find and were just eyeballing the page, since links stand out I'd likely see one. But in a long document with more than a thousand instances and where the string is likely to precisely equal the link text, I can't tell if a found instance is linked or not. I can with hovering, but when there's a lot of searching then I have to do a lot of hovering, which is manual and slow. I have to use hovering because the highlighting is the same either way.

If the page's style is to underline link text and not nonlink text, the underline is still visible in the highlight for a found match, but it is so subtle due to contrast being lowered by the highlight that it is difficult to see. If the style has no underlining of either link or nonlink text, the highlighting makes the color difference in text coloring harder to differentiate.

Examples:

--- Find "text" without quote marks in https://html.spec.whatwg.org/ (even when the Whole Words option is selected, there are more than 1,000 instances).

--- For the effect with mixed underlining, find "available from the WHATWG Standards" (without quote marks) in https://html.spec.whatwg.org/ (only "the WHATWG Standards" is underlined while the preceding found text is not).

--- For the effect with no underlining, find "may be the best hosts in the" (without quote marks) in http://brittlebit.org/ (only "best hosts in the" is link text while the preceding found text is not).

Two solutions:

--- Add an option for the search, like Link Text Only or Links Only. The drawback is that only exact matches would be found, when a user is unlikely to remember the exact wording of link texts and styling is not strongly bound by convention.

--- Without the option, highlight matches but with the highlighting style different if the found instance of the string is a link. If the instance is partly a link and partly not, like if the link text is only part of the found instance, then the styles should be combined: one for the part that is link text and another for the part that is not. I do not know what styling to propose; it should be a relatively small difference, since either way it's for a found instance.

FF version is 78.0.1 (64-bit).

Possibly of interest: Bug 1283078. Bug 1319834.

Comment 1

[Neil Deakin]

You can find text in links using the quote key (').