Alex Faaborg

For any Mozilla contributers in the Bay Area:
On Friday 3/9 to Sunday 3/11 Mozilla will be participating in an Open Source Usability Sprint. The event will be located at Google and will run from 9am-5pm each day.
For people working on Firefox at the usability sprint, our goal will be to re-imagine the Web browser, [...]

Yes?
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the way Firefox interacts with the user when it needs to ask a question, or provide a piece of information. These interactions involve topics like:
-RSS detection
-Password manager messages
-Download manager messages
-Installing updates
-Installing extensions
-Pop-up blocking
-Phishing protection
-A range of other features that are still in the design stage (microformat detection, [...]

Previously
Part 0: Introduction to Microformats
Part 1: Structured Data Chaos
Part 2: The Fundamental Types
Part 3: Introducing Operator
Part 4: The User Interface of Microformat Detection
Now that I’ve posted about what microformats are, why the browser should natively detect them, which microformats should be detected, and Mozilla Labs has introduced Operator, it’s time to take a look at [...]

Taking a quick break from posting about microformats, I would like to describe some ideas I had recently about the user interface of Firefox’s history.
In Firefox, as well as many other Web browsers, recent history (view “By Last Visited” ) is displayed in a flat list of page titles. From an implementation perspective, this [...]

Yesterday Sherman Dickman, Myk Melez and I met with Tantek Çelik and Ryan King at the Technorati office in San Francisco to discuss potential support for microformats in future versions of Firefox.
Topics Discussed:

They have created a Web service to convert hCard and hCalendar microformats to their binary equivalents, called X2V.
Demo of Operator
The reason Yahoo! has [...]

Previously
Part 0: Introduction to Microformats
Part 1: Structured Data Chaos
Part 2: The Fundamental Types
Introducing Operator, a Microformat Detection Extension for Firefox 2
Today Mozilla Labs is releasing Operator, a microformat detection extension developed by Michael Kaply at IBM. Operator demonstrates the usefulness of semantic information on the Web, in real world scenarios.

Here are some examples of [...]

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 [...]

Previously
Part 0: Introduction

An Explosion of RSS Icons
On his blog, Ray Ozzie has a picture of the various types of buttons that have appeared on the Web to represent RSS feeds:

Several of these are truly bizarre. There seems to be an unusually high occurrence of coffee mugs and pills. I am not really sure [...]

Have you been over hearing people talk about microformats and thought to yourself “what are those?” In this post I provide a quick introduction, and discuss the various ways that microformats are changing the Web.

What are microformats?
Microformats can be explained in a number of ways, but the easiest way to explain them is to [...]

I got a new car …