Linkclue Reference

Linkclues enhance your browsing experience by providing you with information about the link, on the link, before you click on it. When you mouse over the active Linkclues, the Clueviewer appears.

Some of this information can be guessed at from looking at the status bar when you mouse over the link, but some of it is much harder to discover without Linkclues. Here's a list of the Linkclues currently provided:

Linkclue cursors

	Links which are actually pieces of javascript have this cursor when moused over, as we won't be able to provide a useful preview for them.
	The same situation applies to links which are email addresses.
	Any protocol not currently recognised uses our unknown protocol cursor. Chances are you'll need a browser plugin of some sort to use those links, if at all.
	Links which open in another window, tab or frame use this cursor.
, →	When Linkclues are disabled for internal, or navigational, links, those links will have their cursor changed to this one to indicate that using the Interclue HotKey will show the a Clueview for the link.

Informational Linkclue icons (or, what kind of link is it?)

	, , , Links to other websites will include their favicons as Linkclues — the icon you see at the start of the location bar in your browser.
	, Sites that don't have a favicon of their own will have the Clueview icon, or the Clueview External Link icon, applied, so there is always some Linkclue to mouse over to bring up a Clueviewer.
	A link to an internal reference, or 'anchor' on the current document.
	A link to an anchor located on some other document.
	A link to a site without encryption from one that has, ie. https→http.
	A link to a site with encryption from one doesn't have any, ie http→https.
	If the link is to a file that is not available, the Linkclue changes to this error icon. You can hover the pointer over the icon to see what sort of error it was.
	A link that takes too long to load will eventually result in a timeout icon. This probably means that the page will take a long time to load, if at all.
	Links that appear to be of a kind that may cause changes when clicked on are marked with this icon, and no look-ahead summary is made unless you request one in the Clueviewer.

The 'unsafe' icon needs a little more explaination. Ordinarily, the result of clicking on a link should be to retrieve a webpage, image, file or something similar, and that's all—there should be no side effects. The right way for a website to allow it's users to make changes to something on the site, such as posting a blog entry, editing an article, ordering goods and so on, is to have them fill out a form.

In practice, however, all sorts of actions with side effects appear as links. Some of them are relatively benign, such as a link to a forum entry that changes whether you have read that entry, but some of them can be quite destructive, such as links to delete email, databases and bank accounts.

The plugin tries to avoid doing any look-ahead operations on such links by avoiding links with certain keywords in their text and link (such as 'logout', 'delete', 'remove' and so on), and also by turning off Linkclues for internal links on secure sites, which are typically used for banking, ordering goods and services, and so.

Content Linkclue icons (or, what kind of thing is the link pointing to?)

	Windows executable files.
	This icon covers a large selection of audio extensions, including wav, au, aac, m3u playlists and a host of other formats not covered by specific icons.
	This icon covers a large selection of video extensions, including Mpeg, MNG, AVI and other formats not covered by specific icons.
	FLAC, the free lossless audio codec.
	MP3, the most common lossy audio format.
	ogg, which is a container format typically used for the vorbis audio format, but which can also contain FLAC audio, or Theora video streams, amongst other things.
	Real audio and video streams.
	Windows Media audio and video files and streams.
	Flash videos and animations.
	Quicktime video streams.
	Images of all kinds, including JPEG, PNG, GIF, SVG, and a variety of other formats.
	Working image files created by the GIMP.
	Compressed archives of various kinds, such as 7zip, zip, gz, bz2, cab, and other formats.
	Plain text and rich text files.
	PDF files.
	Postscript files.
	Cascading style sheets.
	Javascript files (as opposed to script fragments that appear as links).
	Greasemonkey user scripts.
	Openoffice word processing documents.
	Openoffice spreadsheet documents.
	Openoffice presentation documents.
	Openoffice drawing documents.
	Openoffice math formula documents.
	Microsoft Word documents.
	Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
	Microsoft Powerpoint presentations.
	, , Vote-Links. (A link based microformat)
	, , , , , , XHTML Friends Network Relationships (A link based Microformat )
	RSS and ATOM feeds
	A Youtube video.
	A WebCal / iCalendar File.

In time, we expect to add more informational and content type Linkclues, as well as using content type information from webservers to make the content Linkclues more accurate.