articulated keywords

This page provides articulated keywords, which work in Firefox.

Firefox's Bookmark Keywords

In Firefox, you can set a keyword for a bookmarked page. This keyword can be typed in as a shortcut to the location bar. If the bookmark link has a "%s" in it, then the text after the keyword will be substituted in.

For example, if the user had a bookmark (with the keyword 'k') of:

http://foo.bar.org/search?q=%s

And the user typed in:

k foo bar baz

Then the browser would construct:

http://foo.bar.org/search?q=foo bar baz

Creating articulated keywords

Given Firefox's bookmark keywords, and javascript's abaility to access the query string of the url, it is possible to write bookmarks which jump to pages which parse the query as a command sequence. Such command dispatch systems usually treat the first variable token as a command, and dispatch to functions registered on those names.

Note: it is also possible to bookmark 'javascript: ...' links, called bookmarklets. These can be quite useful, but require updating, while the articulated keywords method described here need users to set it once, and can be updated in a suite, and all users will see the updates.

Using articulated keyword

To enable these keywords, follow this procedure:

1. right click and bookmark this link: articulated keywords
2. go to 'Bookmarks' -> 'Manage Bookmarks'
3. edit the properties of the articulated keywords bookmark
4. set the keyword of k on the bookmark

Note: this doesn't work if the page is not accessed over the web, as query strings are used to pass the bookmark arguments.
Once you have done this, the commands listed on this page will be available to you.

Commands: