Microformats - Part 2: The Fundamental Types


Previously
Part 0: Introduction to Microformats
Part 1: Structured Data Chaos

The Fundamental Types

If Firefox 3 is potentially going to ship with native support for microformat detection, then a very important initial question becomes “which ones?”

I spent a lot of time over the last month pondering this, and I thought about a variety of different things:

  • The basic types of things people commonly do
  • The applications people commonly use to view various types of information
  • The questions that journalists are trained to ask to get the full story
  • Which Microformats are currently popular

Here is how these four different considerations relate to each other:

Fundamentalmatrix

Here are the three new types of information that I believe Firefox should natively detect and display, because these three types are truly fundamental:

Fundamentaltypesstatic

If you want to get overly philosophical, you can even string these three types together into a sentence to describe our perception of the universe:

Humancondition

These three icons are displayed in “microformat green,” when static information is detected in a Web page’s HTML. But they can also represent feeds of each type of information:

Fundamentaltypesfeed

While many applications support importing information, not all of them support feeds of information. For instance, even though geocasting is a cool idea, I don’t know of a single mapping application that currently supports RSS with a payload of geos. One possible way around this limitation is for Firefox to aggregate microformats sent through feeds, and then forward this information to the appropriate application on a regular interval using that application’s API.

Note that these are certainly not the final icons. If we go with this design, we may need to ship three or four copies of the location icon at different rotations for respectful localization. Also, the calendar icon in particular could use some iteration.

The Web Browser as an Information Broker

Detecting information in Web pages and handing that information off to other applications changes the role of the Web browser from being solely a HTML renderer to being an information broker. This new role for Web browsers was discussed in several sessions at the Firefox Summit in November, and was also recently blogged about by Mitchell in her blog post Follow the Data. Here is a diagram of how the various fundamental types match up against commonly used applications (click through for a larger version):

Informationbroker

Similar to the way Firefox handles search engines, microformat detection (and the associated applications) should be designed as a completely open and extensible platform. This framework should enable contact management, calendaring, and mapping applications to easily integrate with Firefox’s microformat detection system.

While discussion of implementation isn’t really the purpose of this UI blog, I should note that the difficult part of microformat detection is not parsing the data, it is dealing with the wide range of APIs for all of the different applications on all of the different platforms that can consume this data. Thankfully we have an incredible open source community.

This interaction model is fundamentally different from the user interface of Live Clipboard, and I believe it is better for a variety of reasons, which I will blog about at some point in the future.

Next: Introducing Operator

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December 13th, 2006
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Other Posts
Microformats - Part 3: Introducing Operator
Microformats - Part 1: Structured Data Chaos

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Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Cameron
Posted on:
December 20, 2006 at 6:51 am

Type your comment here.

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
Cameron
Posted on:
December 20, 2006 at 6:53 am

Oops, sorry about that previous one.. accidentally pressed enter while attempting to autocomplete…

Anyways, seeing as nobody has yet complained about it, an image of a globe with the USA shown isn’t going to make the rest of the world very happy about it. Many users mightn’t care, but some will.

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
Nick
Posted on:
December 23, 2006 at 5:59 am

Y’know, it shows Canada, Mexico and half of South America too ;-) I would be very surprised if anyone actually complained.

This is all very exciting stuff!

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
Michael Daconta
Posted on:
January 2, 2007 at 10:56 am

Alex,
I think these are great ideas and look forward to downloading and experimenting with Operator. This is exactly the type of innovation that will keep firefox way ahead of IE. Interesting timing, since I was just pushed the new tabbed IE 7 at work, and I was wondering what Firefox would do for its next act.

One other possible idea would be to see if these microformats could refer (link) to each other. Unless, of course, you already implemented that! Thus, I could have my contact info refer to my work address which could refer to my work organization contact which could refer to a set of work-sponsored events … etc.

Excellent work!

- Mike

Comment Number:
5
Written by:
John Milan
Posted on:
January 2, 2007 at 3:18 pm

This looks great. Two questions:

1) Would the FF microformat database be available to other desktop applications?

2) If so, could you describe how a desktop app might interact with it? (IE. read only, some things updatable, must export data to a file, web service on localhost, etc).

Thanks! This is a great development.

Comment Number:
6
Written by:
Kingsley Idehen
Posted on:
January 3, 2007 at 1:42 pm

This is why RDF should note be taken out of FF :-) RDF is the model for handling these Data Spaces for which the Browser will aptly act as “Data”, “Information”, or “Knowledge” Broker. I make the distinction becuase: “Data is Data” and everything else is subjective :-)

Comment Number:
7
Written by:
Alex Faaborg
Posted on:
January 4, 2007 at 3:16 am

>Would the FF microformat database
>be available to other desktop
>applications?

Yes, but probably only to applications that communicate with an extension that the user has explicitly installed in Firefox. If we opened up the database of contacts, locations and events to any application running on the desktop, we would essentially be enabling Spyware 2.0

>If so, could you describe how a
>desktop app might interact with
>it?

None of this has been determined yet, but I would imagine microformats would be stored in history using Places:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Places

Comment Number:
8
Written by:
Mikel Maron
Posted on:
February 3, 2007 at 4:05 am

“For instance, even though geocasting is a cool idea, I don’t know of a single mapping application that currently supports RSS with a payload of geos”

Mapufacture.com supports GeoRSS, and will soon support RSS and XHTML containing Geo Microformats.

Really interesting stuff!

Comment Number:
9
Written by:
Andy Wong
Posted on:
March 11, 2007 at 9:03 pm

From Alex
“Similar to the way Firefox handles search engines, microformat detection (and the associated applications) should be designed as a completely open and extensible platform. This framework should enable contact management, calendaring, and mapping applications to easily integrate with Firefox’s microformat detection system.”

This is really excellent idea, not only solve the problems of overcrowed icons in web page, but also improve the interaction between web and desktop applications and other web applications.

Really an information broker.

I am the lead programmer of a desktop contact management program. We always tried to improve the interaction between the desktop program and the web application.

What Alex is going to do is really a good news.

Comment Number:
10
Written by:
unyou
Posted on:
June 5, 2007 at 2:20 am

“Y’know, it shows Canada, Mexico and half of South America too I would be very surprised if anyone actually complained.”

Consider this post a complaint

Comment Number:
11
Written by:
Le Sage
Posted on:
June 14, 2007 at 5:13 am

OK, contact, location, event. hCard² & hCalendar. Right.
How about others (official ones) like hReview & hResume? Is it planned to add them? Or is it definitely given up for Firefox3?

Comment Number:
12
Written by:
Lasuren
Posted on:
October 9, 2007 at 1:03 am

I am supported very strained like Firefox 3 the Microformat querying? We wait for it simply times.

Comment Number:
13
Written by:
Mike
Posted on:
February 15, 2008 at 12:02 pm

Very interesting thoughts and developments. I’m excited to see how this will turn out.

We (at ESRI) develop plentyful of georss feeds which definitely will turn into need for built-in geocast features - cool!!

About the icon itself: I also think that the US-centric worldview (as you have already stated in your blog) doesn’t seem to be appropriate, but then again, once the globe icon is shrinked down to 16×16 pixels it might as well be Australia (same with the calendar). Probably the pictorial should be simplified. I like the feed and person who work very well. Unfortunately I haven’t come up with anything better yet - but let you know if I do.

Thanks, great work!! Mike