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
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