I was reading an article about a passenger revolt on a Continental flight (reading articles like this makes it painfully obvious why the American airline industry is in deep trouble, and it’s all their own doing). I noticed at the bottom of the article, a small little tip:
To find reference information about the words
used in this article, double-click on any word, phrase or name. A new
window will open with a dictionary definition or encyclopedia entry.
As one can imagine, I spent the next few minutes wildy clicking on everything from “Newark” to “the.” It’s really cool, but not perfect. Double clicking on a word will only pull up a literal definition of the word, so “Baltimore” returns an entry about the city, not BWI Airport, as it is used in that context. I really like the unobtrustive integration, however, instead of irritating in-your-face pop-ups like Snap or sticking ad balloons into random keywords.
In college, I took a class called Literature in a Wired World (that was the only English class I could imagine being tolerable). We discussed extensively on the theory of hypertext, and how text is no longer read in a completely linear fashion. While yes, adding links has been around forever now, this is one of the first native implementations of this. Cool.
