codedread

How many times have you told a friend or colleague “Go to http://example.com/some/doc and search for XXXX” ? I do it a lot actually. Ideally web pages should identify significant sections of a web page with identifiers (id=”foo”) so that you can link to http://example.com/some/doc/#foo, but the problem is that not everyone follows this practice. In fact, there are a lot of big specification documents where you’d like to point someone to a specific paragraph to save someone time and encourage them to actually visit the link and read it. This becomes increasingly important as the mobile web accelerates and small screens with harder-to-use keyboards become more prevalent. I hope this Firefox extension will help. Click To Read More...

I’m working on my first Firefox extension - an attempt to get Firefox to support some version of XPointer that will work on HTML documents. Click To Read More...

Lots of talk these days about allowing SVG inline with text/html content. I thought I’d try and put some thoughts down. Click To Read More...

So far not one of the plot lines on NBC’s Heroes has intrigued me. But Journeyman looks good so far. Click To Read More...

As an update to yesterday’s post I thought I’d elucidate what I’ve learned about XPointer. Click To Read More...

Today I wanted to send a link to a specific location in this web page. If you’re curious, go to the link and search in the page for “square bracket notation”. Unfortunately, the web page does not identify that section in the source. Is there any way to do this with today’s modern browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari)?

What I’m looking for is something like SVG Fragment Identifiers where you can use XPointer syntax in the URL to navigate to a specific section of a document. Before I spend time learning XPointer syntax, can anyone tell me if any HTML browsers support it as fragments in the URLs?

Another option is to link to a cached page from a specific Google Search, but it still requires the user to scroll down to the highlighted section. It’s a shame that Google doesn’t insert specific anchors into the web page for this very purpose. It might make some web authors angry that Google mucks about with their source, but this is a case where I don’t mind - authors should learn to properly identify portions of their documents. This becomes increasingly important for mobile devices with those smaller screens.

I added some Environment Variables to my Windows operating system recently (right-click on My Computer, Properties, Advanced, Environment Variables). I was wondering if there is any way from an existing Command Prompt to pick those up. I know that all Command Prompt instances after this point will have those new environment variables defined, but I was just curious if there was an easy way to get an existing Command Prompt instance to “re-source” its environment variables.

On the other hand, is there any way to add a System Environment Variable to Windows from the command prompt?