[	Tags	|	hacks, liveurls, tech, ui, web, webmarker	]
[	Current Location	|	Hosur	]
[	Current Mood	|	lazy	]

Web Marker does not have a great UI. It is rather in-efficient to select text and move the mouse over to the toolbar to highlight the selection (the context menu option was'nt very friendly either). Taking inspiration from word processors and going a step further, Toufeeq and I have revamped the Web Marker UI. Now Web Marker supports a mark mode (just like emacs and Vim). In this mode selected text is automatically marked at the end of the selection event. The Mark Button toggles between the normal mode and the mark mode. In the normal mode, hitting the mark button does either of the following actions:

1. Marks selected text, if any. Web Marker stays in normal mode.
2. If there is no selected text, Web Marker switches to Mark mode. From here on text selections are automatically highlighted.

Toufeeq brilliantly came up with the above UI behaviour. It is interesting to compare this with the feature available in current word processor like applications. The formatting buttons such as highlight, bold, italics etc. have to enabled every time a text selection is to be formatted. Rather in-efficient, isn't it? Try out the 0.4b version of Web Marker to see how it makes marking web pages a breeze.

Another small thing that made into this version of Web Marker - all buttons of the toolbar are available as floating buttons i.e. they can be attached to any of the existing Firefox toolbars. This lets you save on screen estate. Having a toolbar occupy that much of space was'nt the greatest piece of UI.

Please try it out and let us know. We are hearing.

Sridhar (nearfar) pointed this to me. Ala Web-Marker, Google has added a very nice feature to Google videos, which lets you link from any point of a Google video clip. That is, you can specify the starting point of the video in terms of hours/minutes/seconds. It uses the fragment identifier to specify this offset.

Annodex is a project which aims to standardize fragment identifiers and annotation for audio and video content.

Fragment identifiers are finally being used in a manner that justifies their naming so.

[	Tags	|	tech, web, www06, www2006	]
[	Current Mood	|	calm	]

• Met a lot of interesting and brilliant people
  
• Learnt a lot of new things
  
• Figured out what I should be doing for sometime to come
  
• Took a snap with the inventor of the World Wide Web

• Collaborative Web Tagging
• Current Best Practices in Web Development and Design
• Developers Tutorial: XForms for Web Applications
• Microformats, converting XHTML to vCards and vCalendars
• Semantic Wikipedia
• What Powers Web2.0 Mashups

• Head to http://feeds.technorati.com/events/
  
• Give http://www.worldcupkickoff.com/ as input and get the hcalendar events
• Open/integrate the icalendar file into your calendar application
  

• Random Sampling from a Search Engine's Index
• A Web-based Kernel Function for Measuring the Similarity of Short Text Snippets
• Generating Query Substitutions
• CWS: A Comparative Web Search System

1. Install the Firefox extension from here.
   
2. Select a portion of a web page and invoke the context menu (i.e. right click menu)
3. Select either "Copy link to selected content" or "Copy position of selected content". This action copies the selected content as a URL to the clipboard.
   
4. Open the LiveURL in a different tab/window of Firefox which has the same version of the LiveURLs extension installed.
5. The browser should show the previously selected content highlighted. (If it does not work, report the bug with the LiveURL that did not work)