user-interface

User Interface

Recently there have been many really good user interface ideas and suggestions for working with microformats. This page serves to collect and document them so that we may be inspired by and iterate on each others' works.

Implementations

See implementations, and document examples of good UI from there, here.

• Miffy inserts a green square into the document to represent the presence of microformat
• Some Greasemonkey scripts use a separate iFrame for microformat content
• Other Greasemonkey scripts insert an icon inline into the page
• Tails Export (Firefox extension) can display and export some microformats.

Challenges

• Chris Messina: "What kind of solutions can we come up with that are single click only?"
• Andy Mabbett - How can we make them accessible to people with (for instance) visual disabilities?

Social Network Portability

Why is it that every single social network community site makes you:

• re-enter all your personal profile info (name, email, birthday, URL etc.)
• re-add all your friends

?

Instead, let's see some user interface suggestions for sites to simply import or, even better subscribe to:

• your hCard from your URL (blog, profile from another service etc.)
• your list of XFN contacts, acquaintances, friends etc. again from your URL (blog, etc.)

Concrete suggestions:

• Velvetsarah has posted a screenshot and brainstorm about how a site could handle importing XFN enabled contacts.

Browser Integration

From screenshot brainstorms to working plugins, there is a lot going on with browser integration of microformats support.

Screen Shots

• Jon Hicks: Proposal for a Safari Microformats plugin
  
• Ben Ward: Microformats in Web Browsers
  
• Microformats in Flock
  

Plugins

• The microformat implementations page has some Greasemonkey scripts.
• http://greasemonkey.makedatamakesense.com/callto_tel/ by Scott Reynen
• Tails Export (Firefox extension) by Robert de Bruin.
• Jon Hicks has written a user stylesheet for Mac browsers that highlights hCard and hCalendar data.

Planning and Discussion

• The Camino Wiki has a page where future microformats support is being discussed and organized

Simpler Markup Languages

There are plenty of wiki-formats that attempt to make it easier for more people author semantic markup, often with textually decorative punctuation.

As these simpler markup languages are something that *users* are expected to type, they are user interface.

Markdown extension for hCalendar

See Markdown and the hCal microformat which proposes an extension to the Markdown text markup language to capture and represent hCalendar event semantics in a human editable form.