Re: "Capture"-like browser plugin?

[Daniele Pizzolli <dan@toel.it>]

On Thu, Sep 17 2015, Samuel Wales wrote:

> On 7/23/15, Daniele Pizzolli wrote:
>> https://addons.mozilla.org/it/firefox/addon/org-mode-capture/
>>
>> The latest version convert html links to org-links (disclaimer: it is my
>> little contribution).
>
> this extension is wonderful.  all you have to do is install it and
> then do what you want with it in elisp.  i use it with iceweasel
> 40.0.3 (rebranded firefox).

Hello Samuel,

Nice to hear.

> however, it (or org-protocol) is very flaky.  it works half of the
> time, but sometimes it will do nothing and say "No server buffers
> remain to edit"

So, not so wonderful..  I just found out how to reproduce this problem.

Open a page with two frames, for example:

http://www.quackit.com/html/templates/download/preview.cfm?template=../frames/css_frames/frames_2_column_left_menu.cfm

And pressing C-a (Select All) for the selection.

And then capture the page.

Please note that you can not select the text in both frames using the
mouse.

> and sometimes it will capture the link but not the
> selection.

Do you have an example page for this?  Once we have a really simple
example page with the error we can report a bug!

> it will also sometimes capture something else you copied,
> which does not appear on the page whose link gets capture.

Yes, I saw a note in the code, the /problem/ is that firefox does not
clean the selection when you change tab.  So you select something in tab
1, switch to tab 2 and you get the link and page title of page 2 and the
selection of tab 1.  Maybe there are workaround, like force the cleaning
of the selection after a tab change, but this can impact the user
experience.  I guess that usually you expect the selection to persist
until you paste it, even if you have changed tab, or not?  Coping from
tab 1 and paste in tab 2 is not an exotic use case.

I think that the selection is global and not per tab.  Maybe is possible
to add a selection per tab, by listening to some events.

Another limitation of the selection in firefox is that can not span over
frames and over 3rd party injection of content (not sure on how they do
this those days) but in a page with content and disqus.com you can not
select and capture both with the mouse. And if you use C-a you will bump
into the previous problem.

Hope you find this information useful,
Daniele