Xenotools

Abstract
The rwt-xenotools DOM component links to popular tech forums to search for questions and answers related to this document's topic.

Motivation

Sometimes visitors are unsatisfied with the information provided in your document and need to further research the topic. As a convenience to your visitors you can provide quick links to external forums that may have additional information about the your document's main topic.

The rwt-xenotools DOM component facilitates this by keeping a social-media style linkbar hidden at the bottom of the page until the user needs it.

When activated, the linkbar slides over the page content, showing a collection of icons associated with popular tech forums.

Activation may also be initiated through the component's toggleMenu method or through its event interface.

The component has these features:

• Each third-party link is prefilled with a query value that is determined by the document's <meta content=xenotools:query> value.
• When appropriate, some links are prefilled with a hashtag values that are determined by the document's <meta content=xenotools:tagged> value.
• The Reddit link uses any value provided by the document's <meta content=xenotools:subreddit> value.
• The Github link uses any value provided by the document's <meta content=xenotools:language> value.
• The linkbar has an event interface for showing and hiding itself.
• The linkbar emits a custom event to close sibling menus and dialog boxes.
• A keyboard listener is provided to allow a shortcut key to open/close the linkbar.

In the wild

To see an example of this component in use, visit the BLUEPHRASE website and press F6 "Link to Q&A forums". To understand what's going on under the hood, use the browser's inspector to view the HTML source code and network activity.

Reference

	Documentation	READ WRITE HUB
	Source code	github
	Component catalog	DOM COMPONENTS
	Package installation	npm
	Publication venue	READ WRITE STACK