Thanks for the fix! The core issue makes sense - cmd/ctrl+click on links in embedded iframes doesn't work as expected.

The implementation works, but I wanted to share some thoughts on the approach and potential alternatives.

Current approach concerns:

The button + data-url-params + event delegation pattern feels a bit hacky:

• Raw HTML string templating with data attributes
• Event delegation on a parent div with target inspection
• Two rendering paths (button vs link) in the markdown renderer
• svelte-ignore comments for accessibility

Short-term alternative - Svelte Action:

Instead of branching in the renderer, we could keep <a> tags everywhere and use a Svelte action to intercept clicks in embedded contexts:

// citation-link-action.ts
export function enhanceCitationLinks(node: HTMLElement) {
  const isEmbedded = EmbedStore.isEmbedded();
  
  function handleClick(e: MouseEvent) {
    const link = (e.target as HTMLElement)?.closest("a[data-citation]");
    if (!link || !isEmbedded) return;
    
    e.preventDefault();
    const href = link.getAttribute("href");
    if (href) goto(href);
  }

  node.addEventListener("click", handleClick);
  return {
    destroy() { node.removeEventListener("click", handleClick); },
  };
}

This keeps semantic <a> tags, preserves URL preview on hover in the app, and centralizes the embed-specific behavior. Less invasive than the current approach while solving the same problem.

Medium-term idea - Structured Citations:

The deeper issue is that citations are embedded in markdown strings, forcing us to parse/rewrite HTML. One option would be to have the backend return citations as structured data separate from the markdown content, letting the frontend render them as proper Svelte components.

I've drafted a proposal for this approach here: https://www.notion.so/rilldata/Citation-URLs-tech-clean-up-2c5ba33c8f578030813df6ab43bbb64d

Would love feedback on whether this direction makes sense or if there are concerns I'm not seeing.

If we need to ship quickly, the current PR works. Happy to discuss either alternative further.

Developed in collaboration with Claude Code

Even in non-embed it would do a full page refresh. So I opted to always use goto. There is a safeguard for cmd/ctrl+click in embedded context.
There is another option to not have rewrite at all and only rely on the click handler. But we will lose the option to remove the link if it is invalid.

As for the long term fix,

1. We dont really do additional parsing. We piggy back on marked library which already does a markdown => html conversion. It just has a hook to transform the final html.
2. We are still parsing and rewriting the response, [citation:N] => segments.
3. Doing partial conversion from markdown and rendering them in segments doesnt feel right to me. If we do this, we should rely on marked library to create svelte components for us.

Here's where we can continue the discussion of the longer-term refactor: #8502