CanLII Now Has Deep Linking
Those who get Slaw’s entries by RSS or email may not regularly read comments to our posts and so might have missed a rather important, laconic comment to my entry yesterday on the New York Times’s deep linking feature. Lexum’s Ivan Mokanov wrote in to say that CanLII now has anchors at the paragraph level in judgments. They’d just not got around to announcing it. And they’re planning to build further functionality around it.
The illustration Ivan gave makes the point clearly and simply. This link
http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2010/2010scc63/2010scc63.html#par14
will take you to directly to paragraph 14 of the judgment in question (Canada (Attorney General) v. McArthur, 2010 SCC 63, as it happens.)
As yet, you have to manually add the “#par[number]” to the end of the URL for a case. Presumably, one of the refinements coming will be a visible paragraph link within the judgment you can click on to obtain the precise URL.
Congratulations to Lexum on yet another great addition to the functionality of CanLII.
I did a little experimenting with these deep links, and found that not all the paragraphs had anchors – so it’s possible that they are still in the process of implementing the functionality.
For example, in this judgment, http://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2011/2011onsc56/2011onsc56.html, the paragraphs with anchors go only up to 39.
Yet in this Federal Court case
http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/fct/doc/2010/2010fc1318/2010fc1318.html, the anchors go all the way to paragraph 82, the last one in the decision.
I am pleased to see that the anchors work on older cases – take for instance this judgment from 2005
http://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2005/2005canlii4938/2005canlii4938.html
Thanks for your cheerful comments, Peg and Simon. We are indeed going through some bug fixing, a process that should be finished within a couple of weeks. We will then make a proper announcement on CanLII’s blog.