This is the MultiLink Demo...

Daniel Smith - JavaJoint@gmail.com
27 February 2012

I like cars, beer, and cities. There is so much to say about any of those topics, but where to put all of the links for them?

Go ahead and click on any of the ones above. Aha, you say! Each link functions as a sort of menu, or tooltip, or simply as a nice preview of where one could take off to...

So imagine I have a blob of data about links. Each bit of it contains:

• a link id (its name)
• a label (what you see on the page)
• a url (where it should go)
• a list of tags (such as "nyc", "bridge", "brooklyn")

I dont have to clutter up the web page with all of that data. I can simply refer to a few link ids, and I get a list.

But we can also talk about tags, such as one for "bridges". You can refer to tags that may or may not exist elsewhere on a page (maybe your tag gets filled in tomorrow, and then it will automatically show up in your list).

So if I want to say that a friend and I are going to have lunch in Petaluma, and talk about Australia, I can quickly gather all of the links to provide context. (assume that the creation of the data file gets automated, and that it is easy to pick things out of it.)

This works with the data-* attribute of HTML5. A list of beer ids might look like:

data-dls="SierraNevada, Racer5, Heineken"

Or I may refer to them by a tag, which has the leading '.' character (much like CSS, which uses '.' for classes)

data-dls=".pilsner" // make a list of all links that have a tag of "pilsner"

And I can combine these:

data-dls="MunichMap .pilsner .GermanFood"

That's a hint as to the idea of MultiLink.

See the blog post for this:
One Link, Many Paths, Clicking Choice! (MultiLink, Part 2)