No tasteful way, no. And probably no way at all when it's on a third
party website like LexisNexis -- short of getting the user to install a
browser plugin maybe, which will require different code for every
browser, which is a lot of work to go to for a feature that I predict
will really annoy your users.
User education, and trying to insist to our vendors that we insist on
actual bookmarkable URLs, are the only things I can think of. If you're
going to try to convince the vendor to add a 'feature' to annoy the user
like this, I'd rather try to convince the vendor to create actual
bookmarkable URLs on their platform.
On 11/29/2010 1:49 PM, Ken Irwin wrote:
Hi all,
I have just, for the severalth time, just talked to a student who had lost a
bunch of work in a common way: he had copied-and-pasted a bunch of
database-content URLs on the fairly-reasonable (but, of course, incorrect)
assumption that those URLs would get him back to the content later. He happened
to be in LexisNexis, but it happens in lots of databases.
Here's what I'm wondering: is there any tasteful/sane way of using JavaScript
to detect when a user clicks into the URL bar and copies/cuts the URL from a
page that will do the user no good later? It would, to my mind, be completely
civilized for the database provider to generate a little popup window alerting
the user to the error of their ways.
User education would be great, of course, but some sort of built-in alert would
be very friendly.
What think you all? Would JS or some similar tool be able to achieve this?
Ken
