[uf-discuss] Microformats and Firefox 3

[Farndon, Tony]

> Alex Faaborg wrote a clever mail about this earlier and 
> presented a few issues and a few possibilites related to 
> protocols. It was then discussed that perhaps there should be 
> one protocl for each microformat? 
> That would if so enable different programs to easily take 
> care of different microformats.
> 
> You'll find Faaborg's mail here (is this the usual way to 
> share an older mail on a mailing list or how is more common?):
> http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2007
> -August/010536.html

Yes, apologies, I do lurk on this list, but sometimes it is just too
overwhelming so sit back and watch. Am up for posting today, so probably
repeating whats been said before.

Just browsed the archives a bit and quite like Scott's approach of <ul
class="user-actions"><li><a
href="http://mozilla.org/add_to_address_book">...

Instead of a protocol, FF could intercept this url. Rather than opening
up a webpage, it carries out the action. It degrades better so that
FF2/IE/Safari users are directed to an actual page describing
microformats in Firefox 3 rather than receiving an unknown protocol
error. Easy to add plugins/extensions to these other browsers to
intercept the url as well.

One might want to use a browser agnostic url though.


So FF3 intercepts the url click of an href of
http://actions.microformats.org?q=add-to-address-book, stops the
propogation if appropriate, grabs the q param, looks for the parent
container and adds it to the addressbook. Other browsers will be
directed and get to read a nice page describing hcards and how you can
add them to an address book as vcards using FF3/IE with this plugin/FF2
with Operator 0.9/Safari with that plugin if ever Apple create a decent
plugin architecture etc.

If not in the parent hcard container, add another param for the hcard
id, this would allow you to put actions anywhere on your page and FF can
assess the url to say, ok, this is a uF action, you want to add to the
address book, and it is that hcard, ok.

http://actions.microformats.org?q=add-to-address-book&id=hcard-id
http://actions.microformats.org?q=map-address&id=hcard-id
http://actions.microformats.org?q=add-to-calendar&id=hcal-id

Similar to the way RSS feeds are handled in FF2/3 by choosing live
boookmark, google reader, bloglines etc, a pref pane decides what
happens, is it added to thunderbird contacts, some address book website
etc

That's enough repeating from me today.

T.

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