I want a Firefox extension that lets me select some text on a webpage, right click, and get that HTML in a box to edit. Once I edit it, I want the extension to compute the diff between my edited copy and the copy in the web page, find an address to send it to the author of the page via e-mail, and send the diff to them. To find the e-mail address, it will look in the HTML for a hint via some standard HTML or some semi-standard HTML dealie that it defines itself. If it doesn’t find the e-mail address that way, then maybe something like trying to send e-mail to the technical contact for the domain name, according to Whois. Or maybe just “webmaster@$domain”.
I want this because it is just completely stupid that I see little typos on websites and can’t easily report them to the authors. What’s really infuriating is when you see them on big news organization websites, and can’t easily send a nastygram asking them to please refrain from destroying the English language. The gall of these assholes, who lecture bloggers about how only real journalists should be allowed to write, then they publish articles with errors any copy editor should be able to find. I see them several times a week, and have been seeing them for years. It still pisses me off every single time.
The format of the message should be easy to parse automatically, too. That way, people who want can set up scripts that take the e-mail in and apply the diffs directly to their website. It’s an e-mail powered, only-on-approval version of a wiki, but for all websites, not just wiki ones.
It just might work.
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