Chrome extension for creating html 'book' from wikimedia pages
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Author(s) and publish date
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Dave Raggett
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- Published:
I am involved on behalf of W3C with some European research projects where we are using a wiki to collaboratively work on reports for project deliverables. To assist with preparation of the final form of the report, I have created a cross platform Chrome browser extension that adds a context menu item to create and download an HTML file with the combined content from the current page and all of the wiki pages it links to. You can then export to PDF via print to PDF if your browser supports it, or with tools like PrinceXML. The extension and information on how to use it is available on the wikibook page.
This is a very cool idea and I love the concept of being able to 'export' wiki pages. However, what about all the 2nd and third layer links? A lot of good information is found after drilling down multiple times, and it might be hard to export more than one layer of links. Very cool!
I thought of that. The extension will follow links in the pages it loads and keeps a list of previously visited pages to avoid looping. Links are only followed if they are to the same wiki, and you can prevent following a link by enclosing it in a span with class="no-follow". This should be used when a page in your collection links to another part of the wiki that you don't want to include. It should also be used when making forward links to a later part of the collection, as otherwise your assembled html page may have the content in an unexpected order.