Re: Checklink AJAX hack

On 27 Oct 2005, at 05:13, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> I was bored yesterday, decided it's time to look at "AJAX", and  
> came up
> with this hack: http://qa-dev.w3.org/~ville/ack/

Hmm, cool. Very interesting, thanks for sending this in. Does not  
work well with safari, but for a one-day hack, it's working quite  
superbly on every other browser I tried.

> Example output (hint, hint ;)):
> http://qa-dev.w3.org/~ville/ack/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fqa-dev.w3.org

I really really don't see what you're trying to imply, here ;).  
(fixed, thanks)

> It's a very rough prototype, pretty-to-very inefficient wrt. resource
> usage everywhere, missing features compared to the real link checker,
> pause/resume doesn't work properly with IE and probably there are  
> other
> bugs lurking here and there but I thought someone might find it
> interesting nevertheless.

It is, indeed, fairly limited compared to the current link checker,  
but I see something really interesting that could be done with it.  
Since the code to check the status of each links (as opposed to  
parsing the content and extracting all the links) is done with client- 
side scripting, I can imagine how it could be embedded in any page,  
and let the user check all the links *from* their own pages.

in more details:
- give people a "copy this code" to paste into their page. The code  
would basically be a <script src="..."></script>. There could be a  
"check links" button that would trigger checking all links (similar  
in a way to how the "valid foo" icons point to check?uri=referer.
- the script could change the look of the links (via color-coded  
background around the links themselves, or document.write() a report  
<div> in the current page
- etc.

I think this could be useful, and very complimentary to the service  
that the current checklink already offers.

Now, coming back to the original idea of an "ajax checklink", it  
sounds interesting and is definitely titillating in terms of UI, and  
I think we could look into client-side scripting as an alternative to  
our "this is slow" UI issues. However, I suggest being cautious about  
the idea of moving to ecma/javascript features that we are used to  
handle with perl: as far as I can tell, client-side scripting is a  
massive pain to make really cross-platform, and the lack of  
programming tools make it hard to maintain too.

cheers,
-- 
olivier

Received on Thursday, 27 October 2005 04:34:45 UTC