What if the XMLmind editors allowed me to create links from valid URLs
in 3 simple steps:
1. Insert/Write/Identify a valid URL in your XMLmind document
(Docbook, Dita, XHTML);
* E.g. https://example.com
2. Select that URL;
3. Click the Link-creation button.
Voila! Ready! (Although the user may post-edit the link text, if he/she
wants.)
* Expected code as result, HTML example:
* <a href="https://example.com";>https://example.com</a>
* Actual behavior today, HTML example:
* <a href="???">https://example.com</a>
* In the document, however, the link element has already changed
color to blue, so it “looks ready” - which in itself sometimes is
confusing.
* To actually complete the element, one must perform at minimum 5
additional steps (after the 3 steps I mention above):
0. often I find that I need first to reselect the very link
element;
1. now, go to/look at the editor’s attribute editing
interface;
2. then select the right attribute - href;
3. then one must select the old content ("???")
4. and then one must paste the URL into the field)
* (you might even need to re-copy the URL before you can
paste it!)
5. and finally press enter.
At step 1, possibly only a subset of the the valid URLs should work. For
instance if the selected text EITHER corresponds to a fragment URL
(#fragment), OR if the selected text corresponds to an external URL that
begins with "://" at the minimum (://wikipedia.org/wiki/XML as well as
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/XML and http://wikipedia.org/wiki/XML).
Other variants of this proposal is/could be that XMLmind editor also
considers whether the content of the clipboard corresponds to a URL. And
yet another variant is that the XMLmind editor ask for confirmation that
the selected text and/or clipbaord content should be used as URL. I am
not certain what, eventually,the perfect solution ought to, or could,
be.
Often, one would be using the URL as link text. But in many other
situations, the user would, after the link has been created, edit the
link text to a more readable link text.
My justifications for this proposal:
1. When writing, I need to point to external
references/documents/sources all the time. And I keep wishing that this
was simpler/faster to do.
2. Currently, I tend to first go fetch (read: copy) the URL from my
browser. Then I paste it into the footnote or whichever place I need it.
Then I select the URL and click on the link-button in the XXE interface,
which turns the selected piece of text (in this case: a URL) into an
element that creates the link: an a-element in XHTML, a xref-element in
DITA, link-element in Docbook. The problem is, however, that at this
moment, the link has not been created because the link’s URL attribute
at this moment remains empty/invalid: One must now manually select the
correct attribute (href in DITA and XHTML and xlink:href in Docbook) in
order to actually create the link.
3. One of the defacto competitors for WYSIWYG-like editors like the
XMLmind editors, is intermediate markup such as MarkDown and Wiki text.
And one of the things that the intermediate markup formats simplifies is
the insertion of links.
4. It is a pretty common feature of many programs of various kinds to
recognize URLs and turn them into links. And thus, some interaction
between text format and element formatting has many examples “in the
wild” and would not be something unexpected, for users.
Sorry if I have overlooked a feature that XMLmind has already
implemented ... !
Best regards,
Leif Halvard Silli
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