Mwuki: bookmarklets and keymarks

bookmarklets and keymarks

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it's a bit confusing, here's what I understand:

You can have bookmarks that contain pieces of Javascript for a URL, these are "bookmarklets". My limited experience of this was a bookmarklet several years ago stating "put this code in a bookmark to prevent sites from disabling the context menu". IIRC it was from the official Firefox sites. It didn't work. I still don't know much more about these things, try a search for "bookmarklet" in the official FF Knowledge Base, you will find nothing. There was a "bookmarklets" site which apparently coined the term, but it doesn't look very technical, it looks more like a repository of canned scripts.
You can put keywords with certain bookmarks, and then when you enter that keyword in the address bar, you get the corresponding URL. The keyword obviously has to be unique for this to work! Where this comes into its own, is that you can edit %s into the URL when you set up the bookmark, and then when you use it, any text you put after the keyword in the addressbar gets substituted in, so you can customise your address bar to be able to make fast simple queries on all sorts of sites directly. This facility is called "keymarks". Although I'm not entirely clear whether that's just the text-subtituted version (IE, using parameters), or the whole idea of keywords in the first place (IE, just shortcuts to ordinary webpages).

Presumably it is also possible to make bookmarklet keymarks, whereby you supply parameters to javascript code to be executed, in the address bar. That could probably be quite useful somewhere.

Anyway, what I really want ATM, is to be able to make a piece of code I can run very readily, without having to make a damn extension. Having it available by the context menu would be nice, but I can't find anything on programming that via javascript, I keep finding bloody web-design pages where people are emulating it in DHTML for their pages :( Having it available via hotkeys would be nice, but Firefox apparently doesn't give you the ability to do that. Getting the code via keymarks would be far too clunky in this case, really. So my best bet appears to be making a bookmarklet that's right at the top of the bookmarks menu.
(AH! Or, I could reenable the bookmarks toolbar, and put the bookmarklet in there??)

Now I just have to find something useful about the bloody things!!
Well I found these, quite informative.

The Evil Lurking In Your Browser Melodramatic title, sure, but covers an important security/social concern that really could very easily be disastrous for people. Also shows a lot of what good things you could do with them, and how. Worth a read!
IRT: Javascript bookmarklets, bit of an introduction and tutorial type thing, more or less.
Bookmarklets.com: Javascript for making bookmarklets (not very long, but does also have a very worthwhile links page)
Natalie Downe's blog: bookmarklet entries
oddly named site with big list of bookmarklets the title and URL severely set my alarm bells ringing, but the actual bookmarklets look pretty safe from here, from what little I saw of them.

javascript:void(prompt('pants','no')) was a little bit of test code I did, pops up a dialogue box with a field, with default text in there. If you leave out the void(), it loads a page after with the result of the prompt instead. If you leave out the 2nd argument to the prompt, there is no default text. I ought to see if there's other options for this sort of thing, it'd be nice to have a multi-field dialogue.

In terms of code to go in them, AJAX code would be very useful for what I want to do, interfacing with a local CGI app, run on my own machine. Most probably not full-on XML Ajax, just a bunch of fields in most cases. Or I suppose I could add bookmarklet interfaces to the web-apps here on Neologue.

bookmarklets and keymarks

see also