Page MenuHomePhabricator

VisualEditor: No way to identify destination, rather than link text, of links
Closed, ResolvedPublic

Description

Because the VE splits up the destination of a link and the text displayed for it (quite rightly) it's impossible, in VE mode, to identify where links point to without source editing. This is kind of a problem for disambiguation issues, for example. Is there any way that this could somehow be hunt-down-able?


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz49928

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 22 2014, 1:45 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz49928.

You can just click the floating "chain" icon to see the name of the destination article.

What does this bug relate to in particular? Was there some use case where this isn't working/isn't possible?

The workflow of "this article has DAB issues, it's pointing to [disambiguation page], I should point it to [proper page], now to find the link that's pointing to the disambig- shit."

(In reply to comment #0)

Because the VE splits up the destination of a link and the text displayed for
it (quite rightly) it's impossible, in VE mode, to identify where links point
to without source editing. This is kind of a problem for disambiguation
issues, for example. Is there any way that this could somehow be
hunt-down-able?

Hover over the link; that's the target, not the anchor, that comes up in the pop-up tooltip.

However, this doesn't work well if you know there's one link to [[foo|xxx]] somewhere on the page and you want to change it to [[bar|xxx]], I agree.

No, hovering over each link is not the answer: if I'm looking at a large article and want to find and amend the link which is pointing to some particular other page (perhaps in connection with cleaning up dab pages etc), I want to be able to use something like ctrl-F "Find" as I can at present: once the article is open in Edit Source, the hidden text is searchable.

As an example, look at [[User:PamD/sandbox for VE]] and find the link to [[Dunmallet]]. Now imagine if that page was the length of [[London]] and you needed to find a similar piped link.

Might also be an issue if people want to find (and check parameters of, or amend, etc) one particular template which is used on a page, but doesn't "show up" in the visible article. And probably various other scenarios. ~~~~

This is now done with the new context widget system.

It's nice, but doesn't really address the workflow in comment 3.

(In reply to James Forrester from comment #3)

However, this doesn't work well if you know there's one link to [[foo|xxx]]
somewhere on the page and you want to change it to [[bar|xxx]], I agree.