Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Nested Links

When I was just starting to learn Polish, I'd have trouble remembering the pronunciation of some letters. For example, if I ran across the city Łódź, I had to look up the ł, ó, and ź to realize it was pronounced "woodge". It would be nice if there was a technique for nesting hyperlinks within each other, and then allowing the user to specify the level using their mouse position (the height — closer to the baseline would mean a deeper level). So if I wrote code that nested the name [[Ł][ó]d[ź]], it would allow me to click on any of the three letters, or the entire link.

Individual letters is probably a language-specific use, but this makes a lot of sense when linking to information composed of difficult words — each word could be associated with a dictionary entry, while the whole phrase would be the normal link. Or if you were looking through a geneaology, and you see "John Smith": maybe you want to follow that exact name, or just his family name, or find out about the frequency of his first name.

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