Re: Microformats UI in Firefox 3

Sorry for the long delay in posting an update to this
thread, we are  
still working on finalizing the UI for interacting with
microformats  
in Firefox.

Here is something Mike Beltzner, Mike Kaply and I have been 

considering for microformat handling in Firefox 3, in terms
of the  
content area.  We would like to propose a way for content
authors to  
add actions to their microformats, without having to worry
about  
backwards compatibility.  For instance:

<div id="hcard-Alex-Faaborg"
class="vcard">
  <span class="fn">Alex
Faaborg</span>
  <div class="org">Mozilla</div>
  <div class="adr">
   <div class="street-address">1981 Landings
Dr. Building S</div>
   <span class="locality">Mountain
View</span>
,
   <span class="region">CA</span>
,
   <span
class="postal-code">94043</span>
   <div class="user-action"
style="visibility:hidden">Add to Address  
Book</div>
  </div>

The last class is new:
   <div class="user-action"
style="visibility:hidden">Add to Address  
Book</div>

The text "Add to Address Book" is hidden by
default, unless the  
browser (or an extension) recognizes user-action, in which
case the  
text is rendered as a hyperlink, and clicking it sends the
structured  
data in the hCard to the user's address book.

user-action is just an example of what we could call this
class, it  
seemed to make sense.  Also instead of a hyperlink the
author could  
use an image, like Wolfgang's icons (http://factorycity.n
et/projects/ 
microformats-icons/).

This is a bit of a hack, but it is also considerably easier
than  
asking the author to write javascript to check
navigator.userAgent,  
know which browsers handle microformatted content (and
subsequently  
update this as it changes), and then display the link
accordingly.   
Also, I'm interested in allowing user generated
microformatted  
content to be added to blogs and wikis where javascript is
not  
commonly allowed.

Since this is something we are thinking about for
microformat  
handling in Firefox 3, we would really like to get feedback
from the  
uF community before we consider implementing it.

-Alex



On Aug 1, 2007, at 11:40 AM, Alex Faaborg wrote:

> Mike Beltzner, Mike Kaply and I are going to try to
finalize the  
> user interface for interacting with microformatted
content in  
> Firefox 3 this week, possibly later today.
>
> If anyone has any last minute suggestions or thoughts,
please post  
> them soon.  I'll also update this thread with mockups
of what we've  
> decided on so we can get feedback on the proposed
interface.
>
> -Alex
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discussmicroformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microforma
ts-discuss

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Alex Faaborg skrev:
> This is a bit of a hack, but it is also considerably
easier than 
> asking the author to write javascript to check
navigator.userAgent, 
> know which browsers handle microformatted content (and
subsequently 
> update this as it changes), and then display the link
accordingly.  
> Also, I'm interested in allowing user generated
microformatted content 
> to be added to blogs and wikis where javascript is not
commonly allowed.
A bit of friendly fedback here, not saying that I would be
right at all 
only sending out some thoughts that may be useful or may be
garbage.

Instead of having to checking whether the userAgent is right
or wrong in 
my javascript - wouldn't it be possible to check for the
presence of any 
hCard-related function instead? This way it would at least
be 
theoretically possible for any web browser to add such a
function, 
either officially or through a third party plugin, and so
trigger the 
website to view the possible actions.

It seems a bit unusual to me to have a class like
"user-action" which 
the browser should find and change to visible and make a
link out of or 
something. Couldn't another solution be to add some kind of
a 
"protocol"? Like
uf://foobar.com/foo.html#bar-hcard Firefox could 
process such a link by extracting the hcard with the id
"bar-hcard" and 
for Internet Explorer a third party program could deal with
the link in 
the same way that Skype deals with call: and Thunderbird
deals with 
mailto: or I could choose to hide the link from IE users.
This would be 
a more usual approach because it already exists for other
kind of data 
like mailto: , javascript: , call: etc.


/ Pelle W
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In message <694BBF6E-7DC6-477A-8618-E1721FDA4441mozilla.com>, Alex 
Faaborg <faaborgmozilla.com> writes

>The last class is new:
>  <div class="user-action"
style="visibility:hidden">Add to Address 
>Book</div>
>
>The text "Add to Address Book" is hidden by
default, unless the browser 
>(or an extension) recognizes user-action

...or unless the user agent has no CSS functionality
available.

Is that "degrading gracefully"?

-- 
Andy Mabbett
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