[Cross-posted from EndUserSharePoint.com] Recently I’ve been playing around with jQuery and some other JavaScript-based interface interactions. And so a couple of days ago I came up with another idea: the focused href.
The idea is simple: you are looking on a large content page in SharePoint: procedure document, article, Wiki, etc. You are particularly interested in one piece of text on that page which you would like to share with your team. How to let them know which part do you exactly mean? Of course you could copy & paste the fragment and mail it to them, but there is another way…
I’ve created a way to highlight areas of the page. Check out the working example: click on the focus link (enables drawing the selection rectangle) and draw the rectangle on the screen. Then click on ‘Focused link’. You can now copy the URL and set it over to your team and they will see the particular page with your selection focused!
Question that Mark Miller of EndUserSharePoint.com and me have to you is: how would you use it? We’ve already have a solution but what is the problem you think it would solve?
A SharePoint Solution Looking for a Problem: The Focused HREF @ EndUserSharePoint.com.
January 6th, 2009 at 11:11 am
I would use this within a FAQ that is linking to more information within a manual or guide of somesort. Currently I'm doing this with bookmarks, but that just emphasizes the paragraph while this would be emphasizing the exact part of a sentence within a paragraph. Kind of like a RTFM or a JFGI link.
January 6th, 2009 at 11:39 am
@Johan: Cool idea! I really like it. Especially for troubleshooting. If you are able to pinpoint the exact solution/steps instead of reading the whole page: sounds like a time savior to me
January 6th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Yes, exactly what you mean, but maybe you\'d want to add a close button to the overlay so a user following the link can first read the highlighted part and the remove it and quickly read on to something interesting further down the page.
January 6th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
@Johan:
there is a hidden feature. You can dismiss the selection using either Esc or Space (depending on the browser as Esc is not supported by all of them).
January 6th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
And maybe by using something like control (CTRL) to enable making a dual-selection? This would be useful for pointing out things like "If you click here, something changes overthere". Even more than two selections could be useful in some occasions, but a dozen or more would probably be overdoing it
.
And in case javascript is not working maybe there should also be a bookmark where the link is going to. This way, in the case the javascript is not enabled, the user gets linked to at least the correct paragraph the old way.
January 6th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
@Johan: as for the bookmark it is supported by most browsers I believe. Simply add #bookmarkname to the URL and then include either an <a name="bookmarkname"> or <someelement id="bookmarkname"> in your page.
As for multiple selections: wouldn't it make it less clear? Sure there might be a situation when multiple regions on the page might be relevant, but wouldn't it be better then to send two links?
January 6th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
@Waldek: Yes, already thought that the bookmark would be possible. Maybe you\'d want to mention it in the manual accompanying the final version.
Making two links would probably be the easiest solution, but multiple selections would be cool though, allthough I guess that it could complicate the current code.
January 7th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Neat feature, but what does it have to do with SharePoint? A jQuery plugin would be more appropriate wrapper.
January 7th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
@Berry: it doesn't have anything to do in SharePoint yet, but I can imagine there are a lot of different ways you could use it in combination with SharePoint.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Doesn't work in Safari 3/mac. Sounds like a good idea tho
January 8th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
@Casper: Thanks for the feedback