An example implementation of this feature is Gwern.net’s “link-bibliographies” (eg). We extract all URLs from the Markdown, filter, turn them into a list with the available metadata like title/author/tags/abstract, and because we assign IDs to all links, we can also provide a reverse/backlink ‘↑’ popup of the context in the page where the link was used (and a link might be used multiple times). Wikipedia links are included, but stuffed into a sublist at the end because they would drown out the regular links. It uses dynamic/lazy transclusion, so it doesn’t cost anything if you never look at it, but if you want to print out the page or something, that should also be doable as they get loaded then by the print-mode.
We also plan to include a second version of the link-bibliography, a ‘browsing history’ version, which quietly logs each link you interact with in a big list at the end of the page (we’ll probably put it before the full link-bibliography). So the standard full link-bibliography provides all the URLs, but the browsing-history would provide just the shortlist of URLs you interact with, in the order you interacted with them. The idea is that you could more freely move in and out of popups if you didn’t have the anxiety of ‘losing’ them, because there’s an append-only log, and after reading a page, you might skim the browsing-history and open up some of them for further reading or to jog your memory about what you were reading at one point. Since the links are in temporal order, it should be easy to reconstruct your train of thought at any point as you were reading. (You could also use it to create a sort of ‘custom bibliography’, where you pop up a small subset of links focused on some particular claim or thesis, and you can save that to PDF or something.) Since it’s all transcludes, the browsing-history is also effectively free (you already paid the cost of downloading & rendering each entry when you popped it up the first time).
An example implementation of this feature is Gwern.net’s “link-bibliographies” (eg). We extract all URLs from the Markdown, filter, turn them into a list with the available metadata like title/author/tags/abstract, and because we assign IDs to all links, we can also provide a reverse/backlink ‘↑’ popup of the context in the page where the link was used (and a link might be used multiple times). Wikipedia links are included, but stuffed into a sublist at the end because they would drown out the regular links. It uses dynamic/lazy transclusion, so it doesn’t cost anything if you never look at it, but if you want to print out the page or something, that should also be doable as they get loaded then by the print-mode.
We also plan to include a second version of the link-bibliography, a ‘browsing history’ version, which quietly logs each link you interact with in a big list at the end of the page (we’ll probably put it before the full link-bibliography). So the standard full link-bibliography provides all the URLs, but the browsing-history would provide just the shortlist of URLs you interact with, in the order you interacted with them. The idea is that you could more freely move in and out of popups if you didn’t have the anxiety of ‘losing’ them, because there’s an append-only log, and after reading a page, you might skim the browsing-history and open up some of them for further reading or to jog your memory about what you were reading at one point. Since the links are in temporal order, it should be easy to reconstruct your train of thought at any point as you were reading. (You could also use it to create a sort of ‘custom bibliography’, where you pop up a small subset of links focused on some particular claim or thesis, and you can save that to PDF or something.) Since it’s all transcludes, the browsing-history is also effectively free (you already paid the cost of downloading & rendering each entry when you popped it up the first time).