Sunday, October 28, 2007

Instant answers

CBS news web site has a pretty cool feature: if you highlight a word in an article, instantly a popup window appears with a definition from answers.com.
It only happens with a single word highlighted, so it is not likely to be an irritation. I like it. It popped up just as I was about to activate my macro copying the word and looking it up at answers.com.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cool. But it works only when you select the word by double clicking, not from mere highlighting (at least for me).

It seems they are calling it AnswerTips.

These kinds of things are what they refer to as "Ajaxifying" your web site.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Huh?

Anonymous said...

Eolake said: "Huh?"

"Cool" is a slang word meaning excellent and impressive. I liked the feature you reported on.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Thank you very much. I wonder why I never heard that expression before. It's... "cool".

Anonymous said...

Or did you perhaps mean to ask about "ajaxifying"?

Ajax is a buzzword referring to a newish programming technique for the web. People use it to create interactive features such as AnswerTips.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Aha. Cool.