On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 23:46, adam beecher wrote:
> I think the answer is "yes and no", or more accurately "yes, but only with
> certain browsers, and it would be ki-hinda tricky". (I just watched
> Scrubs, sorry Janet.)
>> In /theory/, you're supposed to be able to drill right down to the
> sedimentary posterior of a document with the DOM (Document Object Model),
I think the problem is that an arbitrary stretch of user-highlighted
text isn't addressable using DOM technology.
> so in /theory/ it should be possible to use an event handler (onClick,
> onMouseDown, etc) to discover where you are in the DOM, convert the
> relevant element into a string, and then the rest would be easy-peasy.
If it was DOM-bound it would be easy.
> However I don't know how to do that; and neither does Internet Explorer,
> so if the function had to be cross-browser, you'd need to delve into the
> pretty world of MSDN.
I don't think I wish to know about that :-) Strange that after a decade
of the Web, you can't double-click a word and send it to a dictionary:-)
Instead, you have to copy and paste it into a separate page/window/form.
> Now if each word had an individual identifier (<span
> id="word3">word3</span>) it would be way easier, but obviously that would
> make your load time a /wee/ bit heavier,
That would defeat the objective, which is to let the user highlight a
word or phrase in mid-para, by definition *not* markup up in any way.
> Have a look through a few of these for a bit more info on DOM granularity
> (word of the month), particularly the one on the Mozilla site about
> halfway down and the one with W3C in the title towards the bottom.
>>http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=dom+word+click
Some useful references, thanks. If the W3C wasn't in Microsoft's pocket
this would all have been sorted long ago.
///Peter
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