SuttaCentral code upgrade request

A consistent request by many users of SuttaCentral has been for the addition of user specific highlighting of specific content on the web pages, bookmarking etc.

I recently came across Weava - a Chrome browser plug in that allows users to create and store customised highlights on web pages, store and arrange such pages in topic folders etc.

It works on the Access to insight website, Wikpedia etc

However, it doesn’t work on the SuttaCentral website!

Bummer!

Could I request the SuttaCentral dev team to consider modifying their code in such a way as to support this feature? Perhaps at the time of the next site upgrade?

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Are you asking for an upgrade to the code so the plugin works, or are you asking for the feature of highlighting, etc, to be added to SC itself?

There are many, many web services that don’t work with SuttaCentral and I have long been frustrated by that. But I figured that Bhante must already be aware of this.

For the feature to be added to SC itself would be a big undertaking. You’d need to have an account and the data would likely have to be stored on SC’s servers. Browsers generally can’t store data other than cookies, and if it was put there, when you did a clearing of your browser cache it could all be deleted. (I could be wrong about these limitations, however)

I think it makes much more sense to manage these things on your own. Then you are sure they will not be deleted and you can fully organize things as you like, including notes, etc. Weava looks great except things seem to be stored on their servers. So when they go out of business, what happens to your data?

I suggest the open source note app Joplin. It even has a great browser plugin that lets you clip webpages into notes. I’ve been using it for about a year and it works really well. I’ve even been considering making a post about it here. Of course it’s different than Weava, but you own all of your data.

All that being said, it would be great if SC could be used by these services. Is this something you are working on/aware of Bhante @sujato?

Thanks, we’ll bear it in mind, but debugging third party tools, which often have little to no technical documentation, is no easy job.

Weava has a list of sites their tech doesn’t work on, I’d suggest adding SC—I have!

Is SuttaCentral still doing the whole “shadow dom” thing? It’s extremely frustrating. I can’t even use my browser’s built-in “ctrl+f search on page” feature because, to the browser, the entire sutta is semantically UI text :confounded:

@faujidoc1 - My current workaround is to print every sutta I read to PDF. Seriously. Then I can search and highlight and even scroll without the top bar jumping up and down :joy:

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For sure. However, I don’t think I have ever seen a third party tool of this type that worked with SuttaCentral.

I started this wiki page with the hopes that perhaps one of the items mentioned might help provide a clue as to what’s going on:

When I do a view page source on a sutta page on SC, I don’t see any content of the sutta at all. Only if I select a bit and then do “view selection source” can I see any text.

Even Ctrl + a won’t select anything on the page.

I mention all this not as a way to complain but just to point out that there seems to be something very different about SC from other websites and it makes it less useful in many ways.

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