IDEA: Wikipedia @ click?

[Ace_NoOne]

Hello,

let me begin by saying that I've tried to do this myself, but I guess I'm not qualified/experienced enough yet.
I'd posted the following over at the AutoHotkey forums, but it didn't elicit any response.
Thus I thought you guys here might be interested in the idea:

A friend just told me that Babylon Translator now offers a glossary that's connected to Wikipedia.
This means that you just have to middle-click any word or phrase and Babylon will display the respective Wikipedia article:


So I thought, why spend 50 $ on Babylon; this can be done with AHK as well - or can it?
Here's what I think the program should do:

• First, middle-clicking a word or phrase marks it as the keyword to look for. This means there needs to be a way to somehow recognize the text under the mouse pointer. (I've considered using copy & paste for this - mark the phrase, then middle-click to copy the word/phrase to the clipboard - but not all programs use the same hotkey for that... )
• Then, the appropriate URL is composed (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%keyword%).*
• Finally, the contents of that website (or part of it) should be displayed in a small window (similiar to that screenshot above). Opening the URL in the web browser would pretty much obviate the need for a program like this. However, writing a HTML parser is obviously not an option - maybe the existing IE rendering engine could be used (never done that before)? Otherwise, all the HTML tags would have to be stripped and the contents displayed as plain text...

* This means that not only Wikipedia, but any website with the keyword(s) in the URL could be accessed (cf. Firefox's quick searches)!?

Sounds like a good idea? Any suggestions on how to best translate this idea into AHK code? (I'm currently working on a little proof-of-concept script to see what can and can't be done - and how much effort it'd require.)

btw: I hope there aren't any copyright issues in accessing a website like that!?


PS: What would be a good name for such a script/program? I've thought of something like Information@click, but that's a little too corny I guess...

[brotherS]

Lets see if anyone wants to make some tool out of this idea. I just use Win+i to pop up an input box where I could enter an URL - or I could use other triggers right in that box too, for example search http://www.imdb.com or http://fileforum.betanews.com/

This works pretty damn fast. If this would be something for you too, just let me know.


http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=1167.0

[mouser]

it should be extremely easy to have a little (autohotkey for example) script that when you press hotkey copies the selected text and opens up a specific search in an existing or newly launched browser window.

some extras suggested by your idea would be:
1) dont open in normal browser, use a special small popup browser.
2) present user with menu of sites to search.
3) extra stuff.

i like it, good idea. lots of room for extra features.