Previously
Part 0: Introduction to Microformats
Part 1: Structured Data Chaos
The Fundamental Types
If Firefox 3 is potentially going to ship with native support for microformat detection, then a very important initial question becomes “which ones?”
I spent a lot of time over the last month pondering this, and I thought about a variety of different things:
- The basic types of things people commonly do
- The applications people commonly use to view various types of information
- The questions that journalists are trained to ask to get the full story
- Which Microformats are currently popular
Here is how these four different considerations relate to each other:
Here are the three new types of information that I believe Firefox should natively detect and display, because these three types are truly fundamental:
If you want to get overly philosophical, you can even string these three types together into a sentence to describe our perception of the universe:
These three icons are displayed in “microformat green,” when static information is detected in a Web page’s HTML. But they can also represent feeds of each type of information:
While many applications support importing information, not all of them support feeds of information. For instance, even though geocasting is a cool idea, I don’t know of a single mapping application that currently supports RSS with a payload of geos. One possible way around this limitation is for Firefox to aggregate microformats sent through feeds, and then forward this information to the appropriate application on a regular interval using that application’s API.
Note that these are certainly not the final icons. If we go with this design, we may need to ship three or four copies of the location icon at different rotations for respectful localization. Also, the calendar icon in particular could use some iteration.
The Web Browser as an Information Broker
Detecting information in Web pages and handing that information off to other applications changes the role of the Web browser from being solely a HTML renderer to being an information broker. This new role for Web browsers was discussed in several sessions at the Firefox Summit in November, and was also recently blogged about by Mitchell in her blog post Follow the Data. Here is a diagram of how the various fundamental types match up against commonly used applications (click through for a larger version):
Similar to the way Firefox handles search engines, microformat detection (and the associated applications) should be designed as a completely open and extensible platform. This framework should enable contact management, calendaring, and mapping applications to easily integrate with Firefox’s microformat detection system.
While discussion of implementation isn’t really the purpose of this UI blog, I should note that the difficult part of microformat detection is not parsing the data, it is dealing with the wide range of APIs for all of the different applications on all of the different platforms that can consume this data. Thankfully we have an incredible open source community.
This interaction model is fundamentally different from the user interface of Live Clipboard, and I believe it is better for a variety of reasons, which I will blog about at some point in the future.
Next: Introducing Operator
Technorati Tags: Firefox 3, Gran Paradiso, microformats
Type your comment here.
Oops, sorry about that previous one.. accidentally pressed enter while attempting to autocomplete…
Anyways, seeing as nobody has yet complained about it, an image of a globe with the USA shown isn’t going to make the rest of the world very happy about it. Many users mightn’t care, but some will.
Y’know, it shows Canada, Mexico and half of South America too ;-) I would be very surprised if anyone actually complained.
This is all very exciting stuff!
Alex,
I think these are great ideas and look forward to downloading and experimenting with Operator. This is exactly the type of innovation that will keep firefox way ahead of IE. Interesting timing, since I was just pushed the new tabbed IE 7 at work, and I was wondering what Firefox would do for its next act.
One other possible idea would be to see if these microformats could refer (link) to each other. Unless, of course, you already implemented that! Thus, I could have my contact info refer to my work address which could refer to my work organization contact which could refer to a set of work-sponsored events … etc.
Excellent work!
– Mike
This looks great. Two questions:
1) Would the FF microformat database be available to other desktop applications?
2) If so, could you describe how a desktop app might interact with it? (IE. read only, some things updatable, must export data to a file, web service on localhost, etc).
Thanks! This is a great development.
This is why RDF should note be taken out of FF :-) RDF is the model for handling these Data Spaces for which the Browser will aptly act as “Data”, “Information”, or “Knowledge” Broker. I make the distinction becuase: “Data is Data” and everything else is subjective :-)
>Would the FF microformat database
>be available to other desktop
>applications?
Yes, but probably only to applications that communicate with an extension that the user has explicitly installed in Firefox. If we opened up the database of contacts, locations and events to any application running on the desktop, we would essentially be enabling Spyware 2.0
>If so, could you describe how a
>desktop app might interact with
>it?
None of this has been determined yet, but I would imagine microformats would be stored in history using Places:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Places
“For instance, even though geocasting is a cool idea, I don’t know of a single mapping application that currently supports RSS with a payload of geos”
Mapufacture.com supports GeoRSS, and will soon support RSS and XHTML containing Geo Microformats.
Really interesting stuff!
From Alex
“Similar to the way Firefox handles search engines, microformat detection (and the associated applications) should be designed as a completely open and extensible platform. This framework should enable contact management, calendaring, and mapping applications to easily integrate with Firefox’s microformat detection system.”
This is really excellent idea, not only solve the problems of overcrowed icons in web page, but also improve the interaction between web and desktop applications and other web applications.
Really an information broker.
I am the lead programmer of a desktop contact management program. We always tried to improve the interaction between the desktop program and the web application.
What Alex is going to do is really a good news.
“Y’know, it shows Canada, Mexico and half of South America too I would be very surprised if anyone actually complained.”
Consider this post a complaint
OK, contact, location, event. hCard² & hCalendar. Right.
How about others (official ones) like hReview & hResume? Is it planned to add them? Or is it definitely given up for Firefox3?
I am supported very strained like Firefox 3 the Microformat querying? We wait for it simply times.
Very interesting thoughts and developments. I’m excited to see how this will turn out.
We (at ESRI) develop plentyful of georss feeds which definitely will turn into need for built-in geocast features – cool!!
About the icon itself: I also think that the US-centric worldview (as you have already stated in your blog) doesn’t seem to be appropriate, but then again, once the globe icon is shrinked down to 16×16 pixels it might as well be Australia (same with the calendar). Probably the pictorial should be simplified. I like the feed and person who work very well. Unfortunately I haven’t come up with anything better yet – but let you know if I do.
Thanks, great work!! Mike
I believe a lot of people are mistaken by the somewhat misleading ‘native support for microformats’ claim. FF 3.0 can have plugins detect microformats. That does not, I repeat not, make it ‘accessible to the masses’. Masses don’t know about APIs and JavaScript, or even the quite obscure operator plugin. Once it shows up in the browser _by default_, then they will notice. Like the currently very visible RSS icon (which still probably over 50% of users don’t know about).
Y’know, it shows Canada, Mexico and half of South America too ;-) I would be very surprised if anyone actually complained.ı have followed your writing for a long time.really you have given very successful information.
In spite of my english trouale,I am trying to read and understand your writing.
Hi Alex,
Ranganathan do you Know?
Ranganathan was one of the most important theorist of Library and Information Science, a mathematician and librarian from India:
- http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranganathan
- http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ranganathan_for_ias
He proposed Colon Classification, a speciall classification for categorize all knowledge of the World like as Decimal Classification Universal (DCU) that you can see for organize the books of any library of the Occidental World.
Is very impresive that the types of information that you proposed implement in Firefox as Microformats:
- Feed – When
- Contact – Who
- Location – Where
- Event – What – How & Why
are exactly the original facets proposed by Ranganathan:
- Personality – Who
- Matter – What
- Energy – How & Why
- Space – Where
- Time – When
the philosophical substance of the Colon Classification expressed in the future implementation of Microformats of Firefox seventy five years after. wow! ;-)
cordial greeting and a happy new year from Madrid, Spain
And who is going to solve the problem of figuring out how to teach the ‘masses’ what all this stuff means.
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