[Copyurlplus] CopyURL+ and Firefox 3

[marbux]

Intentional thread drift warning. :-)

<rant>

CopyURL+ is my most-used Firefox extension. I do an incredible amount
of web research and writing. But the extension is in dire need of an
active developer/maintainer. It is not just the Firefox 3 version
clash; we went through the same thing in the transition from Firefox
1.x to 2.x. Phillip obviously does not have the time to continue
developing and maintaining the extension.

Moreover, the extension would be far more useful to far more people if
it were itself extended. E.g.,

-- A GUI dialog for creating customizations and arranging extension
menu items in a hierarchical fashion (my set of menu items for the
extension is nearly a full screen's depth). Right now, creating
customizations is for geeks only;

-- EOL settings automatically selected for the environment in which
the instance of Firefox is installed;

-- An option to write an assembled clip as a Firefox bookmark with
keywords and a description rather than just stuffing the environment's
clipboard.

-- A history optional setting that not only writes to the
environment's clipboard but also writes to a history file that can be
set for an optional number of clips to be stored on a first-in/first
out basis. (Garbling a clip through an edit of the file copied to
remains a pain, requiring relocation of the page from which the clip
was assembled and reprocessing with the extension.)

-- A richer vocabulary for the customizations; e.g.,

---- Markup for a parser that translates the environment's date/time
stamp into date only for "last visited on [date]" citations required
by many writing stylebooks;.

---- Markup to grab and process a web page's HTML meta keywords;

---- Markup to grab and process a web page's HTML meta description;

---- Markup to extract and format citations from those embedded
literature data base pages  (see e.g., the Zotero extension at
<http://www.zotero.org>);

It would also be helpful if a better system could be created for user
exchange of customizations, e.g., an RDBMS repository of
customizations that users can post their customizations to along with
short descriptions of their functionality and metadata for
classification of them. E.g., I have customizations for HTML, XHTML,
Tikiwiki, MediaWiki, BB markup, and my own instance of extended Drupal
5.x that include some markup unique to the Drupal extensions I use.

In summary, CopyURL+ is very useful for geeks but immature for
everyone else. It also has incredible potential to be made far more
useful for everyone. I don't have the necessary skills myself, but it
would really be wonderful if someone with the right skills might
consider taking over responsibility for its maintenance and further
development.

</rant>

Best regards,

Paul E. Merrell, J.D. (Marbux)

--
Universal Interoperability Council
<http:www.universal-interop-council.org>