Un-over-engineering the ACM Digital Library

I have a gripe with the ACM Digital Library website. It is too hard to get the BibTeX from an article's page. Now, you might be thinking that I am crazy. After all, the link to the BibTeX is right there.

Well, that link is stupid. Its real target isn't the BibTeX (in fact, it's the citation page you are already on). Thus, you can't right-click and save the BibTeX file directly. Instead, it helpfully opens the BibTeX in a new window via its onclick event handler. And that's actually the same window for every article, so if you find a bunch of articles and click all the BibTeX links thinking you will get something sensible, you actually get one window showing the BibTeX of whatever you clicked on last.

I have created an alternative. It's not perfect, but it only took about 45 minutes to create, including all the time needed to learn how to make and package an extension for Chrome. What this extension does is add an inline frame containing the BibTeX so you can copy it to your bibliography database.

One caveat: the extension is currently hard-coded to work on two domains: portal.acm.org and portal.acm.org.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu. The latter is how I browse ACM from home. I could change this to work more generally (and thus request more permissions upon install), but it already works for me. Go ahead and submit a patch if you want to.