[uf-discuss] Microformats UI in Firefox 3

[Pelle W]

Alex Faaborg skrev:
> This is a bit of a hack, but it is also considerably easier than 
> asking the author to write javascript to check navigator.userAgent, 
> know which browsers handle microformatted content (and subsequently 
> update this as it changes), and then display the link accordingly.  
> Also, I'm interested in allowing user generated microformatted content 
> to be added to blogs and wikis where javascript is not commonly allowed.
A bit of friendly fedback here, not saying that I would be right at all 
only sending out some thoughts that may be useful or may be garbage.

Instead of having to checking whether the userAgent is right or wrong in 
my javascript - wouldn't it be possible to check for the presence of any 
hCard-related function instead? This way it would at least be 
theoretically possible for any web browser to add such a function, 
either officially or through a third party plugin, and so trigger the 
website to view the possible actions.

It seems a bit unusual to me to have a class like "user-action" which 
the browser should find and change to visible and make a link out of or 
something. Couldn't another solution be to add some kind of a 
"protocol"? Like uf://foobar.com/foo.html#bar-hcard Firefox could 
process such a link by extracting the hcard with the id "bar-hcard" and 
for Internet Explorer a third party program could deal with the link in 
the same way that Skype deals with call: and Thunderbird deals with 
mailto: or I could choose to hide the link from IE users. This would be 
a more usual approach because it already exists for other kind of data 
like mailto: , javascript: , call: etc.


/ Pelle W