[uf-discuss] Microformats and Firefox 3

[David Mead]

Mike,

I must say the way I'm using Operator in Flock & Firefox at the moment
(using the auto-hide function for the toolbar) is working well for me.

I think one way to go is to utilize the same functionality as the
"this site wants to open pop-up windows" that Firefox has.  A small
toolbar-like message that appears above the page, but not seemingly
part of the chrome, that informs you there are microformats on the
page.

This could then disappear after a short time or after a click to
"highlight" them on the page or open a sidebar/toolbar to interact
with them.

I think automatically highlighting by use of a icon (webcards) or
change of cursor is cool to start with but I personally tired of it
after a while.

I would love to see a new button in the URL bar, like Flock has for
when there is RSS, media streams or a SE plugin on the page.  That is
one feature of the new Flock I find I'm  using a lot now.

I also think there should be something to check in the options panel
so I can choose to have any action based on a microformat in the page,
open a new tab or window, if it doesn't involve an external
application.  Maybe that's on a new tab within options where I can set
the default handlers for different microformats?

I'm really looking forward to this being part of the new Firefox.

Dave

On 9/4/07, Mike Kaply <microformats at kaply.com> wrote:
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss at microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>


-- 
David Mead
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