[uf-discuss] Re: Microformats gets strong showing in Firefox 3 UI

[Toby A Inkster]

Mike Kaply wrote:

> I'm the one to talk to. And yeah, I think the cursor isn't so good for
> that reason. I'm still waiting for someone to come up with the
> "perfect" microformats UI.

My vote would be (at slight risk of littering) an address bar icon with a
drop-down menu to access each microformat item on a page.

Accompany this with a microformats sidebar, listing all contacts, events,
tags, etc on a page. A single click on an item in the sidebar, scrolls the
page to that location, as if HTML element had been linked to using a URL
fragment. (The page author could style the element using CSS3's :target
pseudo-class.) A double click on the item in the sidebar launches the
default action for that item -- e.g. adds a contact to your address bar,
finds a location on Google Maps, etc. A right click on the item would
offer other actions to be performed.

The sidebar could have options to sort the list alphabetically, in page
order, or by category (Contacts, Places, Events, Tags, etc).

Specific microformats also have certain other locations where they could
be used -- rel-tag might be automatically used when bookmarking a page to
record keywords for the page, making searching simpler; rel-license could
perhaps be used in some sensible way when a page is saved.

-- 
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.12-12mdksmp, up 102 days, 19:52.]

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