“This will hopefully make it much easier for people to write software that consumes microformats and maybe bring the “chicken” of adding microformats and the egg of finding good uses for them a bit closer together.”
… this is a powerful demonstration of how you can use your markup as an API to let the advancing capabilities of CSS do things you could once only do with client- or server-side scripting. Now that’s exciting.
I have an idea of where I could easily add some additional info, in stead of reverting to JavaScript, some inspiration for Mapanui v1.3. Thanks!
To get us in the Christmas spirit, over at 24 Ways, Elliot Jay Stocks shows us how to set up an Christmas hCard in “A Christmas hCard From Me To You“. If you’re looking for a simpler (non-chrismas-y) walk-through, revisit John Allsopp’s “Styling hCards with CSS” from 2006.
If you want to enable the Microsoft Oomph microformats framework in Firefox on any site supporting hCard/hCalendar, you can with Pascal’s Oomph Greasemonkey script. But take note of the notice though, the Microsoft hosted script can track your click stream…
Aza Raskin of Mozilla introduces a new experimental (alpha 0.1) project, called Ubiquity, a power user’s CLI extension for Firefox. It integrates Google Maps/Translate/Gmail, Twitter, Digg, Wikipedia, TinyURL,… and allows the user to mashup content himself, through a command line. It’s very similar to PodiPodi, Catalog/Devo extension, but being developed backed by the Mozilla community.
Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions.
Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs.
Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
Three minutes into the video, a demo of Craigslist and mapping a number of rental unit addresses, and the note that this would take advantage of microformatted data, exactly like my own little project, Mapanui.
You can extend Ubiquity by writing your own commands (and share them with the world), using JavaScript. Ubiquity also uses the fab jQuery library (obviously) for rapid JavaScript development (though not using $ but jQuery for compatibility).
A nice push for microformats and an Open Web.
Something to keep an eye on, and look forward to full Firefox 4 integretion.
Yahoo earlier (in March) proclaimed to embrace the Semantic web:
LinkedIn is to mark up user profile pages with microformats. Yahoo search could then understand the content and relationships between pieces of content and present that data in an intelligent way in Yahoo search.
Last week then Yahoo introduced a number of changes to its default search experience to add more structured data to results using SearchMonkey widgets.
Yahoo SearchMonkey is a key part of Yahoo’s attempts to embrace the semantic web and open standards in general.
PodiPodi is a web-based command line interface like Quicksilver (on Mac) or Enso (on Win) for the desktop:
“A special widget which integrates a smart command line interface and a bunch of additional services directly into your website to perform common web-tasks”
PodiPodi offers an alternative UI to your website for power-users. By hitting a shortcut like Ctrl+z you get a jQuery powered command line widget which gives you additional information on the site, a sitemap, Flickr pictures, google search,… Have a play at their playground.
“PodiPodi” doesn’t really roll of the tongue very well though…
An alternative to PodiPodi (which requires web developers to integrate this into their site) could be a Firefox extention like Catalog which puts the same powerful command line interface under your fingers, but then for every webpage you visit. Unfortunately active development seem to be stalled.
Both apps show the power of extending your website under the hood, giving your visitors more power on how they navigate and use your website.
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