Wordlink - Things to do

• Turn pre-existing links into links to Wordlinked page
  Pre-existing links currently “work”, but link only to a bare unprocessed page. Wordlink needs to be changed to convert these links into links to Wordlinked versions of the same page. [Technically, there are two possible ways of doing this (changing baseref to a Wordlinked baseref, or not). I need to think which is best.]
• Make Wordlink get dictionary information from a dictionaries database
  • Fields to include: dictionary name; abbreviated name; source language; target language; interface language; base url; get or post methodology; parameters (as string or as linked table?); character-encoding
  • Need to decide whether the likes of the IATE terminology database, with 24x24 language combinations, are going to be handled by 276 distinct records, or else by a more structured mechanism.
  • JavaScript interface embedded in Wordlink to enable easy choice of dictionary by narrowing things down successively by choosing source language, target language, etc, or else by simply inputing an abbreviated name
  • Testers could be useful in recommending useful dictionaries. If the number got very large, a priority system might be needed, so that the most useful dictionaries appeared at the top of the list.
  • A facility for users to add their own dictionaries would be nice, although this would be too complicated except for certain dictionaries and certain users. Need to decide whether the new dictionary would then be immediately available to everyone, or only to the user who input it.
• By using JavaScript pop-ups, allow dictionary links on words within pre-existing links
  Words within pre-existing links are not currently Wordlinked, as you cannot have links within links. There are two possible approaches to this problem. One is to have a user-choice tickbox in the navigation frame to say that pre-existing links should removed to allow all words to be Wordlinked. The other is to have the links appearing in JavaScript pop-up boxes, à la BBC VOCAB, either for all words or else only for words within pre-existing links.

• Continuing work to track down and try to eliminate the formatting problems seen on certain pages
  Testers could be useful here in compiling a list of problem pages, although currently there are so many of them that they are not hard to find. See the starter table below.
• A system to remember user choices
  It might be useful if Wordlink could remember, either via a cookie or via a fully-fledged login system, the previous choices the user made. This might be useful in particular for users who nearly always use the same dictionary.
• Lexical databases for lemmatization
  Wordlink will be of very limited usefulness for Gaelic, and probably a lot of other languages, until it can cope with wordforms as well as dictionary headwords, so we need to be able to do lemmatization. Ideally this would be a feature provided by the dictionary, but no Gaelic dictionaries and probably only a minority of other language dictionaries do it. So we need at least a “starter” lexical database for Gaelic, and it would be good to track these down for other languages too. We need a method of (optionally?) chaining the lemmatization with the dictionary. Some online dictionaries (although unfortunately proabably very few) may have the feature that if you look for word which they don't have, they at least show you to the right place in the dictionary where the word should be, allowing you to scroll forward and back. An algorithmic method of partial lemmatization via stored rulesets for different languages might also be useful.
• Recognise standard phrases as well as single words
  BBC VOCAB seems to be able to somehow recognise certain simple common phrases as well as single words. It would be good if Wordlink could do this too, rather than always linking everything word by word.
• A technical idea: See if it would be better to use iframes rather than frames
  This might be better in general, but it might also solve a problem which badly needs sorting out at the moment - Firefox and Internet Explorer seem to be opening the Wordlinked page in a new tab or window instead of in the frame created for it. While this might be useful as an option, it is not what we want as default at the moment, and it is very disconcerting to new users.
• Access restrictions
  We would want to avoid access restrictions if possible, and in fact encourage Wordlink to be as widely used as possible. However, Wordlink is in effect acting as an openn pproxyy (deliberately mis-spelled so it won’t be found by Google), which people can use to indirectly access locally blacklisted websites - hence many sites also blacklist openn pproxiess. To avoid this, we might eventually have to setup Wordlink so that:
  • Registered users can access all sites
  • Other users can only access sites which we have registered

» Test pages and examples of pages currently giving problems