Warning when saving a URL containing the hash tag symbol

xsrvmy

I wonder if there should be some sort of warning if you try an save a page using the connector, and the URL you are using ends with # + id, since there is a chance that the URL you are saving will lead to the wrong page. I have accidentally done this once which is why I am asking.

dstillman

Can you provide an example of where this is a problem?

The fragment is part of the URL and, in a dynamic web app, could be necessary to get back to the original content. Zotero should save the current rendered content in the snapshot regardless.

xsrvmy

I forgot a crucial step actually: before saving the page, you click on a section heading on the page. This means the URL you saved takes you to the section, but you might be citing a different section. Additionally, this is not reflected in the page snapshot since the snapshot will open without the ID anchor.

Example: use the connector to save the following URL:
https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.2

If you navigated to 12.2 for some other reason, then forgot, and you save the page intending to cite the whole page or a different part of the page, the citation is misleading. Additionally, this is difficult to notice in zotero itself since the snapshot opens to the top of the page.

I understand that webapps use the fragment part for navigation (I've done it myself). I do wonder how often web apps like that are saved though. Another possibility is to only give the warning if the DOM actually contains the id/name.

Of course this should all be behind an option.

dstillman

I think this is too technical to do anything about. Most people don't know what a fragment identifier is, and there's no particular reason to think the linked section isn't the relevant section, so neither showing a warning nor stripping by default really makes sense. If you do know what the # does, you can see it in your bibliography and remove it in Zotero yourself.

A future version of Zotero might display snapshots within the app, and in that case we could use the fragment identifier so that the snapshot at least jumps to the right section. But we can't do that now because we just launch the file via the OS.

xsrvmy

Is it not possible to open the browser with the fragment identifier in the url?