Bookmarklets
With “The power of JavaScript in the hands of the user!“, Jesse’s Bookmarklets Page kicks off a lovely introduction:
Bookmarklets are extra browser features that you can store as bookmarks on your personal toolbar. For example, if you have search links on your personal toolbar, you can go to Slashdot and then click the toolbar button to search the links on Slashdot. Bookmarklets are actually short JavaScript programs that, when stored as bookmarks, act on whatever page you’re viewing before you trigger them.
A good example of b’lets’ power *yaaa, that’s right, b’lets. I just now used this neologism; did I coin it?* is “test styles” on Jess’s Web Development Bookmarklets page. This makes reference to “Blast Sites with User CSS Sheets“, a “meryl.net article”“, which begins:
All you need is a modern browser [standards compliant, ehh whot? h_b] and a text editor to make use of a powerful tool that will make you wonder why you never thought of [this] before.
Creating your own user style sheets gives you the ability to: find legacy markup; understand how a Web site is laid out; ensure the site is accessible for people with disabilities; conduct fast usability testing
Bookmarklets – free tools for power surfing is another page that looks pretty kewl … “Bookmarklets allow you to: modify the way you see someone else’s webpage; extract data from a webpage; search more quickly, and in ways not possible with a search engine; navigate in new ways …and more. Over 150 bookmarklets are available.” Yup … kewl.
And just this morning a friend pointed me toward Bookmarklets: Search Engine Bookmarklets – www.docjavascript.com, a nice double-handful of b’lets dedicated to that task. *Did I just coin a new term? 20:43AST 10JAN03 hfx_ben* nota: I’m not sure why docjavascript.com appears in this last item’s title.
On this day googling “bookmarklet” returned 34,700 results. Consider yourself duly informed. 😉