And since those of us who do can explain and evangelize the feature, it’s path to growth seems much more clear. Web Snippets, on the other hand, work great right now for any Safari users that understand them. WebSlices needs both publisher and user comprehension and buy-in to be effective and the lack of either will dampen the utility of the feature for the other group, creating a chicken-and-egg problem in adoption. A user can select any element on any web page to create a snippet which is made into a dashboard widget which then continuously updates itself to stay in sync with the content on the original web page (I’ve got a little write up of using web snippets to interact with that might illustrate the point). The way the Safari 3 “Web Snippets” feature handles this seems much more natural to me. Having the publisher pick what material is available as a feed seems kind of backwards. On the other hand, I would extend Scott’s criticism of the a priori design of the WebSlices ‘microformat’ to include the design choice of putting the responsibility for indicate slices in the hands of page authors. I think you’re fighting the good fight in opening what may be a closed wound for a lot of devs: the usability of feeds. Syndication has become such a natural and central part of the geek info ecosystem over the last couple of years since the introduction of RSS and so many of us have lost track of exactly how confusing this stuff can be for civilians. Like Scott, I share your hope that WebSlices can help in the education battle around syndication. I’m hoping that a new way of subscribing to a new kind of feed will also raise awareness about the old ways of subscribing to conventional feeds. There’s a big conceptual barrier there that we haven’t yet brought most people across. Second, because it will introduce many more people to the whole idea of subscribing to feeds. First, because it will give microformats a big boost, and propel the data web forward. It shows up as a favorite, bolded to indicate fresh content:įrom another page, I can peek at the slice’s content by clicking its button:īut when you click Favorites->Feeds, you’ll see it’s also a conventional feed: Both are lit, indicating there’s fresh content.įrom either the toolbar or the inline hover, I can subscribe (to just the second slice) like so: And when I hover over the second slice, another of those pops up. The orange feed icon in the toolbar changes to a (presumably not final) purplish thingy. I’m much more interested in what users will see, do, and understand. For my purposes here, ’nuff said about that. The syntax is based on the hAtom microformat, which in turn is a subset of the Atom feed format. Here’s a complete working example of a page with two slices: I’m hoping that WebSlices, which are dead simple to create, will help bridge the gap. For all its power and utility, feed syndication hasn’t yet really sunk into the consciousness of most people. They transform pieces of web pages into little feeds that you can subscribe to. I think of Activities as next-generation bookmarklets, and also as kissing cousins to the OpenSearch providers that you can add to the browser’s search box. You can see a demo of both in Joshua Allen’s interview with Jane Kim. With the release of the first public beta of Internet Explorer 8, two new features come to light: Activities and WebSlices.
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