Matthias Samwald wrote:
Yes, with most current web-browsers (those that are not aware of the embedded RDF), this could require users to make two clicks instead of one.
I do have the Firefox Operator plug-in installed, but I don't quite understand how this would allow me to skip the intermediary page? For example, when I open http://whatizit.neurocommons.org/template_303.htm, Operator detects the list of formats, but that's about it [see menu.png]!
However, it might turn out that users could be willing to make this additional click, when *significant additional value* is associated with this intermediate page, or when it generally leads to content of high quality. An example are those pages that sometimes pop up when you try to read an open access article and let you choose between Pubmed Central and Biomed Central. I always click on Biomed Central and actually don't really need to make that choice all the time, but somehow I have a positive associations with these web pages. They force me to do an additional click, but in 100% of the cases they lead to a useful, working full-textof the article I wanted.
If you were reading such articles all day long, perhaps you would mind: I'd certainly be quite annoyed if when I clicked on a search result in Google, I always got an intermediary page that asked me if I wanted to open the version in Google's cache, or the original :-)
Being able to get a list different representations is of course useful; I'm just not sure if it's a good idea to use such pages as default targets...
If you look at <http://beta.uniprot.org/uniprot/P05067#section_x-ref> you can see that we made some links configurable, e.g. you can choose the default target for nucleotide sequences to be either EMBL, GenBank or DDBJ. Once you make a choice this is remembered until you change it. This seems to be an acceptable solution from a usability point of view, but of course I'd prefer a more standard mechanism for this kind of thing.
Of course such a page would list all the available formats (and ONLY the available formats).
How are you going to get this information? Would it help if you could do a HEAD request to a server and extract and parse an Accept header on-the-fly, or would you prefer to bulk-preload such information?
<<inline: menu.png>>
