[uf-discuss] Microformats and Firefox 3

[Mike Kaply]

I think some folks here are missing the point in the
Microformats/Firefox 3 discussion.

We are trying to foster a discussion about what to do with
microformats in Firefox 3, we are not trying to tell you what we are
going to do.

This is a very difficult problem to solve and we need input on it. At
this point, the microformats community has primarily been focused on
marking up microformats. We want people to start thinking about how to
communicate microformats to the user.

So here are a few discussion points to get people focused:

1. Microformats UI in the browser needs to be a "transient UI." That
is, dedicating permanent space in the browser to a technology that is
not available on most sites probably doesn't make much sense (at least
at first). What does transient UI in a browser look like?

2. Microformats are in page, and there needs to be some way to
indicate the microformats are available on the page that doesn't
offend page authors. How can we accomplish this?

Discuss.

Incidentally, Operator was always intended to be a UI experiment in
microformats. I'm finding that most people use the toolbar (probably
because it's the default). But there are six different ways to
interact with microformats in Operator
(http://www.kaply.com/weblog/operator).

Mike Kaply