Prologue

Emphasis, with patient help, has moved from its dependency on PrototypeJS to jQuery.

Emphasis

Emphasis provides dynamic paragraph-specific anchor links and the ability to highlight text in a document, all of which is made available in the URL hash so it can be emailed, bookmarked, or shared.

For more information and examples please go to this blog post:

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/emphasis-update-and-source/

Configuration

The main configuration element is specifiying what paragraph elements are in scope and are not. To this end we specify the elements on or near Line 54:

this.paraSelctors = $$(
                    ".entry p:not(p[class]):not(:empty)",
                    ".post p:not(p[class]):not(:empty)", 
                    "article p:not(p[class]):not(:empty)"
                    );

This covers a lot of common markup in many sites and blog. However this could be configured for your specific site.

Example: If all your P tags reside in DIV tags with the "entry" classname, then this would be sufficient:

this.paraSelctors = $$(".entry p:not(p[class]):not(:empty)");

Over at The New York Times, we use the following:

this.paraSelctors = $$('.articleBody p:not(p[class]):not(:empty)', '#articleBody p:not(p[class]):not(:empty)', '#content div.entry-content p:not(p[class]):not(:empty)');

Dependencies

jQuery (Tested with 1.4.4)

Thanks

Levenshtein calculation in the script is based on some nice code by Andrew Hedges http://andrew.hedges.name/experiments/levenshtein/

To-Do

• Further work on UI for highlighting with focus on simplicity
• Social
• Support for touch-based devices