Part 0 - Introduction, http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2006/12/11/
microformats-part-0-introduction
Part 1 - Structured Data Chaos, http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/
2006/12/12/microformats-part-1-structured-data-chaos
Part 2 - The Fundamental Types, http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/
2006/12/13/microformats-part-2-the-fundamental-types
Let's use this thread for discussion.
-Alex
I saw your weblog entires the other day, and I must say I really like
the idea. I can't count the number of times I've needed directions to
somewhere, and had to copy and paste the address from their website
into a better mapping site. Just improving that one area would be a
huge boon, and you've already generalized it to the other important
bits of data as well. I'm not quite sure that the questions
'what'/'how'/'why' are neccessarily too domain specific, but on the
other hand I haven't thought of a good reason why that would be.
db48x
I think your assessment is right on the money. I agree that contact,
location and event are the ones that need to be natively supported. I
am sure there will be many more microformats that are worth looking
into but these three are probably the nobrainers.
Robert Accettura was wondering the other day in his blog how to go
about the flood of icons that are used these for feeds etc. I hope we
can settle for some kind of standard. Matt Brett did an awesome job
providing a feed icon package that lets you adjust it to your
particular layout. I don't see why this should not work with other
icons, e.g. for microformats. I am pretty sure you are right that the
icons that you used are not the last version but I surely hope this
effort converges to something acceptable for everybody.
The number of APIs that are using microformats in a large variety of
formats is an aspect to watch. Let's hope that with time some kind of
standard emerges that people can live with. That would help the
implementation. An open system is certainly nice but its complexity
grows with any new format it tries to support.
Thanks for bringing this discussion on the way. The timing is right for
it.
Cheers,
Rudi
It shows the potential, it is a useful developer extension to see how
it works. But there will have to be other detection functions, that,
first, don't force me to use Google Maps & Calendar, and that don't
force me to use a toolbar. There will have to be some kind of
notification bar, like when popups are blocked.
Nevertheless: Extremely interesting stuff.
You can currently choose between Google Calendar and Yahoo Calendar.
We will try to add additional services soon. Operator (like any
potential native support) will always be a completely open and
extensible system.
>don't force me to use a toolbar.
We will be looking into a wide variety of user interfaces.
Thanks for the feedback,
-Alex
Sebastian wrote:
> I downloaded Operator, and it shows the potential of MicroFormats.
> But if they should be natively supported, there has to be something
> different. I can't tell you what exactly, now. But it took me to read
> the blog post to understand how it works.
>
> It shows the potential, it is a useful developer extension to see how
> it works. But there will have to be other detection functions, that,
> first, don't force me to use Google Maps & Calendar, and that There will have to be some kind of
For example, I want to add an additional service such as Yedda.com to
show me questions and answers on a certain tag.
In Yedda's case (and others with similar URL structure) it simply means
the ability to add a parameterized URL handler so I can define
something like:
http://yedda.com/questions/tags/{tags}
as the handler where {tags} will be replaced by the values of the
various rel-tags on the page.
Eran
Operator already supports this functionality. Check out the file
handler-example.js in the directory where the extension is called. For
yedda, here is what it would look like:
Microformats.tag.handlers['yedda'] = {
description: "Find questions on Yedda",
action: function(doc, item)
{
tag = Microformats.tag.create(doc,item);
url = "http://yedda.com/questions/tags/" + tag.tag;
Microformats.loadUrl(url);
}
};
Save this to a file called "yedda.js" and place it in a directory
called "microformats" in your profile directory and you have yedda
support.
Michael Kaply
Is there any planned support that is more like installing a new script
to GreaseMonkey or the Tails extension? That would allow site owners to
extend and distribute in a more standardized way the ability to add
these things.
Auto discovery will even make it even better (though its a bit more
complex in agreeing on the format ;-) ).
Eran
This may be very slightly off-topic. If so, I apologize. I'm the author
of the post about webcomics microformats you linked to in your
Introduction to Microformats post.
I'm still worrying over these issues. I've just started an informal
webcomics API discussion group, with the goal of a conversation leading
to something I can actually implement on my own webcomicsnation.com
site, and which will also be flexible enough to serve as a starting
point for others.
I have zero experience developing API's and could use all the help I
can get.
If you or any of your colleagues/readers/friends/fellow developers
would like to offer input and suggestions, your presence on the group
would be greatly appreciated.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wcnapi
Just started this today, so there's zero traffic so far, of course.
And thanks for the link!
I'll think about ideas. ;)
Anyways: I really appreciate your work as a UI designer. And: There are
a lot of people out there that think the same ;)
> On Fri, 15 Dec 2006 04:51:10 UTC, Alex Faaborg wrote:
>
>> Part 2 - The Fundamental Types, http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2006/12/13/microformats-part-2-the-fundamental-types
>
> When looking at this I was wondering why the icon that you use for
> Event/Calendar/Time looks like a calculator. I have never seen a
> calendar that looks like this... (So I was reading "People exist on
> Earth and in calculators." ;-) )
> --
> Greetings, | My From: address is valid as is the version without "spam"
> Peter. | I try to find real messages among the spam every few days
That seems perfectly logical to me :)
db48x
>>don't force me to use Google Maps & Calendar
>
> You can currently choose between Google Calendar and Yahoo Calendar.
> We will try to add additional services soon. Operator (like any
> potential native support) will always be a completely open and
> extensible system.
Yea, I really like the way this feature works. I've started work on
one that will send contact information to my Emacs BBDB database. It's
about half-way working at this point.
>
>>don't force me to use a toolbar.
>
> We will be looking into a wide variety of user interfaces.
>
Yea, it would be nice if the toolbar elements were at least
customizeable, so that they could be dragged around. However, that's
not a difficult change to make, and can easily be done in a future
version of the extension.
db48x
> Yea, I really like the way this feature works. I've started work on
> one that will send contact information to my Emacs BBDB database. It's
> about half-way working at this point.
I fixed the remaining bugs and put in a few comments. See http://db48x.net/microformats
In a lot of ways it's not very polished, because it can't detect
failures, or duplicated entries in the addressbook, etc. It doesn't
look in your path to find the emacsclient, or anything like that. A
lot of that stuff is nearly impossible at the moment, though it should
be easier in Firefox 3.0.
This extension is great. I love programming like this. Thanks Mike!
db48x
> Yea, it would be nice if the toolbar elements were at least
> customizeable, so that they could be dragged around. However, that's
> not a difficult change to make, and can easily be done in a future
> version of the extension.
All of the items on the toolbar can be reordered in the Options panel.
The reason it's not draggable right now is because I couldn't figure
out how to make toolbar buttons that were dynamic and draggable.
I would just not do the reordering in the options, and after an
upgrade I would simply look to see if there were any new buttons to
show (new microformats supported or whatever) and if so add them to
the UI by tweaking the currentSet property on the toolbars. You would
have to arrange for that to happen only once. The usual idion is to
set a pref to the current version number when you do it, then on
startup you check that pref, if it's value is a number older than the
current version number, then check to see if any buttons need to be
added.
db48x
> I downloaded Operator, and it shows the potential of MicroFormats.
Me too. Looks good, but it shows the "geo" on :
<http://www.westmidlandbirdclub.com/belvide/index.htm>
as "undefined/undefined".
>You can currently choose between Google Calendar and Yahoo Calendar. We
>will try to add additional services soon.
For events, an option to "create a .vcf and treat as a regular file link
(i.e. launch the default, or some other, application, or save)" (in not
so many words!) would be useful.
--
Andy Mabbett
* Say "NO!" to compulsory ID Cards: <http://www.no2id.net/>
* Free Our Data: <http://www.freeourdata.org.uk>
* Are you using Microformats, yet: <http://microformats.org/> ?
I really wanted to do that, but I couldn't figure out how, which is why
I resorted to just launching the vcf and ics files.
I'm still researching how to cause that dialog to display in Firefox.
Michael Kaply
I didn't investigate geo enough and I didn't know about the short way
of doing a geo:
<abbr class="geo" title="52.6866;-2.1937"/>
I have since fixed this and it will be in the next release.
Mike Kaply
Could you load a data: URL with the appropriate MIME type?
Mike
Interesting. I hadn't thought of that angle. That works, as well as
just getting a file URL for the temp file I create and just loading
that URL.
The only downside is that you get a blank window in Firefox for the
load...
I'll probably switch to that mechanism for now and keep looking for a
better solution.
Mike Kaply
There's something in Fx2 that suppresses blank tabs for that case, but
I'm not sure exactly how to trigger it. You might be able to force
the ucth dialog up by creating the stream from a data: URL and feeding
it into it, but now I'm just making stuff up.
Mike
I installed it and it seems to work pretty well when there are
microformats available. It is a bit annoying to have disabled icons
hanging around when there aren't any microformats on the page. Probably
a known issue. :)
Where is the SVN/CVS/Whatever for this project?
- Rob
> >don't force me to use Google Maps & Calendar
>
> You can currently choose between Google Calendar and Yahoo Calendar.
> We will try to add additional services soon. Operator (like any
> potential native support) will always be a completely open and
> extensible system.
>
> >don't force me to use a toolbar.
>
> We will be looking into a wide variety of user interfaces.
>
I would second this request, it's using up the entire height of a
toolbar, but less than half the width (on my browser) - it would fit in
quite nicely in my menu bar, though. It would be nice if the separate
buttons could be dragged onto whatever toolbar the user wished using
the standard customise dialogue. Also, there doesn't seem to be a way
to turn off the text labels and have only the images.
Overall though, I like it a lot, keep up the good work!
Rob
It's not in a source control system yet, but I'd be more than happy to
take patches at this point.
Mike Kaply
> I have since fixed this and it will be in the next release.
>
Assuming this is the correct place to report defects? If I switch to
'Microformats' Display Style and then go to a page with an hCard, then
select the 'Web page' option from the 'Contact(s)' menu which causes a
tab to open with the web page in it. After that, however, the browser
will not accept any keyboard input - can't type into any text boxes or
the address bar, or use any keyboard shortcuts, though I can cut and
paste using the mouse and right click. Also, all menus and dialogues
continue to respond to mouse input (so I was able to change my
preferences to 'restore session' and restart the browser - which
resolved the issue).
I've tried this on three different installs of Firefox 2.0 and on
several different pages.
Rob
Rob
>>Looks good, but it shows the "geo" on :
>>
>> <http://www.westmidlandbirdclub.com/belvide/index.htm>
>>
>> as "undefined/undefined".
>I have since fixed this and it will be in the next release.
Thank you. When might that be?
I was going to try to get something out before Christmas, but obviously
there is lots of holiday stuff going on :)
I'd really like to get status bar support done before the next release,
so it will probably be the first week in january.
Mike Kaply
I believe I found one of the major performance problems.
To find the the microformats, I have to go through the entire document
looking at classnames. Previously I was doing this once for each
microformat, so five times.
I have changed the code so I look for all the microformats at once.
Hopefully this will help.
I know about xfn, but haven't started looking at how to do a UI for
that yet...
Mike Kaply
The first idea that comes into my mind about microformats is that I
would want it to bridge my personal information (e.g. contacts,
personal schedule, bookmarks etc) with my shared information (e.g. my
blog, communities personal pages, posts and comments everywhere, etc).
This leads me to a couple of fundamental issues to be tackled:
1) Microformats should be able to have actions that interact freely
with the client PC. This is not currently possible with Operator (I've
post my issue in the Operator add-on page), and I guess it's sensible
to consider the security issues that are in the way.
2) The interface Firefox can show us must be carefully aware of what
microformatted data is personal - and thus not shareable with other
plugins/remote accesses - and what is shared. This would imply, from my
point of view, the implementation of access control policies to each
datum (think of blogger's permissions to read/post on each of the
user's blog, for instance).
Having this integrated with a browser will allow to move the user
experience with the Web yet a bit further. Websites would start
adopting this exchangeable formats at the same time plugins for common
desktop and mobile applications start to be written. Don't forget that
users tend to resist change, and if they can still use their
applications while using the browser to increase their productivity,
they will be happier.
Has anyone given a thought about this?
Cheers,
Edgar Gonçalves
I imagen something like the following, but I can't find any useful
links or specifications for such.
<body>
<div><contact>Name: <strong><fname>Joe</fname>
<lname>Blogs</lname></strong></br>Email:
<i><email>joe....@gmail.con</email></i></br></contact></div>
</body>
It would be explained in the xsd as two different name spaces, one set
of tags giving document context the other set of tags giving data
context. it would work really well because you could just strip out the
html namespaces and have a set of data values useful for anything from
product descriptions to a books isbns and your more usual
contacts/calandar/maps thingy ma bobs too. I imagen making a list of
fravourite books too because in the end you can objectify then the most
suprising of things.
Please let me know where I can find more information about the intended
technical direction.
Thanks, Martin Owens
Mike Kaply wrote:
>
> Operator already supports this functionality. Check out the file
> handler-example.js in the directory where the extension is called. For
> yedda, here is what it would look like:
>
> Microformats.tag.handlers['yedda'] = {
> description: "Find questions on Yedda",
>
> action: function(doc, item)
> {
> tag = Microformats.tag.create(doc,item);
> url = "http://yedda.com/questions/tags/" + tag.tag;
> Microformats.loadUrl(url);
> }
> };
>
>
> Save this to a file called "yedda.js" and place it in a directory
> called "microformats" in your profile directory and you have yedda
> support.
>
> Michael Kaply
I am not sure if this is the right place for this, but since there has been
some talk about the Operator extension in this group, I will try here.
My problem is, when Operator 0.6.1 is installed, Firefox does not respect the
value of browser.link.open_external. It is currently 3 in my configuration,
but it is treated as if it was 2, when the extension is enabled.
--
Jesper Kristensen
>My problem is, when Operator 0.6.1 is installed, Firefox does not
>respect the value of browser.link.open_external.
This is a known bug, and Mike Kaply, the author has promised a fix in
the next version, due some time this week. See:
<http://www.kaply.com/weblog/>
(blog-post dated Sunday, January 07, 2007)