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Moving Forward

We've got a whole host of new initiatives going on.

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I've been buried with work and obligations. There is much to report. Expect to hear more here soon about veg-o-matic, blogging bootcamps, and new initiatives.

Bud posted this on March 26, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Greasemonkey & microformats: Getting started

This post presents a ten line javascript that can be used to identify and process virtually any microformatted content. The script uses the Firefox web browser's greasemonkey framework. The script and the general capabilities of modern web browsers suggest a general processing strategy for microformatted content where identification and pre-processing occur in the browser.

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Greasemonkey is designed to make user javascripts easy to write in the Firefox web browser. Since greasemonkey's introduction, literally hundreds of people have written and contributed scripts that alter a page's markup to enhance the user experience. A knock against greasemonkey has been that it amounts to using javascript for ad hoc screen scraping. Greasemonkey scripts are easy to write, but you almost have to write a new one for each web page, and scripts are often not robust to even simple changes in markup on the pages they are written for.

Thus, greasemonkey and microformats seem a natural for each other. Microformats make it possible to create semantic markup structures in standard xhtml that are re-used across many web pages. Greasemonkey scripts written to trigger solely on microformatted xhtml markup could therefore be automatically re-used across many web pages. Further, since microformats are created following standard specification writing practices, deprecated microformat constructs remain part of the spec for some time after their deprecation. When a microformat was revised, greasemonkedy scripts written for that microformat would need only be updated to add triggers for the newer constructs.

However, novices to user scripting, and I count myself among these, generally find scripting for microformats challenging. Microformats add semantics to markup by creating conventions around the use of attribute values. Isolating these attribute values and using them to trigger processing can seem daunting as related by Brian Suda in his account of creating an XSLT script to process hCard, one type of microformatted markup. A simple inspection of this script reveals the pains Suda had to undertake just to identify when the microformat was being used.

I'm writing this post today to introduce a simple greasemonkey script that presents a general and robust method for identifying microformatted content. The script makes use of capabilities built into both Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer that make processing microformatted markup easier than it might be in other contexts. The remarkable simplicity of this script (there are only 10 lines of code) coupled with its power (it even works on pages that are not well-formed) suggests that greasemonkey and microformats are natural allies if you just know the trick of getting them to cooperate.

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Bud posted this on July 28, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

Microformats and the remixable web

To answer Jon Udell and others, microformats enable the remixable web.

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Yesterday, I spent the day at technorati and the evening with Tantek Çelik, Ryan King, Jeff Barr, Chris Messina, and a host of others at the second ever (?) microformats group dinner. A lot happened, and I'm not here to give a blow-by-blow account. Rather, I want to convey the one major insight I walked away with (there were many minor ones). To answer Jon Udell, Microformats enable the remixable web.

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Bud posted this on June 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)