Hypertext was always supposed to be about getting down and dirty with information. Wading in and getting your hands dirty. Wikipedia was a step in the right direction. Now I’m glad I’ve discovered these Firefox add-ons. Web pages are not static slabs of information. They can be manipulated in digital space. The human mind is also easily overwhelmed by too much information. The technology that can cause that overload should protect the user and help him.

Line Marker (top) and Hyper Anchor (bottom) in action.

Line Marker (use Tools –> Add-ons –> Get Add-ons to search and then install) makes the highlighting of text in documents very easy. Especially useful if you’re working through a document and want to mark out important parts. It keeps the highlights when you save the web page externally, but not when you simply revisit the page, although that may just not be working quite right yet.

This kind of micro management of pages makes even more sense when you can properly return to the exact point in a page you were when using the back button. Like to where you made a highlight for example. Some dynamic websites do not scroll back to where you were when using the back button. This breaks the entire principal of having a browser ! Pagemark makes sure Firefox scrolls to where you were on the page. It also has a simple bookmarking capability. Hyper-Anchor is better at actually bookmarking an exact part of a page. It can bookmark the exact location on a page and highlights it as well. In the top image Hyper Anchor has been set to show a blue outline so as not to conflict with Line Marker. Hyper Anchor can only display one highlighted bookmark on the page so it still makes sense having Line Marker. The little Hyper Bookmark icon can also be changed or removed. Like Line Marker it also works with off line pages.

So with the use of a few utilities it’s possible to fight the dreaded information overload. Navigating in hyperspace is recommended.