Florian Sauvin

Florian,

With selections, this would be extremely difficult, since a selection may
extend over several tags. For example in:

<p>Hello World</p>
<p>Goodbye Mars</p>

If I were to select the text 'World Goodbye', what element would the
selection be inside?

Anyway, only Internet Explorer actually creates an object (textrange) for
selected text, and even it cannot give a DOM path for that object. So, the
short answer is no, I do not know of any way to find the DOM path for
selected text.

However, it is possible to work out the DOM path for any mouse event
(except selection events). So, I propose a more simple idea. Instead of
checking for the DOM path to selected text (which is impossible, as far as
I know), why not check for the DOM path to the element that is under the
mouse?

I have written the bookmarklet script called 'DOM path' on:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/bookmarklets.html

hope you find this useful


Mark 'Tarquin' Wilton-Jones - author of http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/

>> <p>Hello World</p>
>> <p>Goodbye Mars</p>
>
>
> the text selected will be only in one single element?
> if we select 'world goodbye', isn't it possible to find the common father?

yes, that would not be too difficult, but since no browser actually tells
us what the parent of selected text is, we cannot actually do anything at
all, no matter what text is selected

> send as an argument the URL of the current page, plus the DOM path...

instead of using mousemove, use a click event. The user clicks the
bookmarklet, then clicks the text they want

DOM path (you will need to modify the URL and messages)

Hmm, how about this for an idea. They click the bookmarklet, then they
select the text, as soon as they finish selecting the text, (using the
mouseup event), the script is triggered and sends the information. This
would even make it possible to send the text they selected as well. The DOM
path would be for where they let go of the mouse button.

That way, I could tell if it related to the selecting of text by checking
for selected text. This would work in Internet Explorer 5+ Win/Mac,
Mozilla/Netscape6+, Opera 7.5+. For now at least, this technique cannot
work in anything else:

DOM path

The click version will work in pretty much all the major DOM browsers,
including:
Internet Explorer 5+ Win/Mac, Mozilla/Netscape6+, Opera 7+, Safari/
Konqueror/OmniWeb 4.5+ and ICEbrowser.

Since I doubt that NetGem and OpenTV (both television browsers) can handle
bookmarklets or mouse events, it would probably not work in them. I also
doubt that you would ever have any visitors using those browsers :)

:D I had a feeling you would have a problem with that.

This is not so easy to do, since there is no immediate way to find how many
sibling elements are the same tag, but is not impossible. I will step
through the previous siblings until I run out. If that element is the first,
there will be no count (even if there were more than one), but if it is the
second, the count will be 2. So, for your example, foo would give:
/HTML/BODY/TABLE/TBODY/TR/TD/
but bar would give
/HTML/BODY/TABLE(2)/TBODY/TR/TD/
DOM path (you will need to modify the URL and messages)