MicroReader Firefox Add-On
March 20, 2007 by Trent Adams
I’ve struck up a conversation with Yihong Ding about taking small steps toward a more effective Semantic Web and an idea popped into my head that seemed worth jotting down. In order to get folks moving in the right direction perhaps something small like a reader of microformats… we could call it a “MicroReader” … might be interesting. It could be something that sits in your browser (eg. a Firefox add-on) and does nothing more than display a list of detected microformat tags in the page being read.
While not a lot of folks are leveraging microformats (from what I can tell), it might be a way to increase awareness of their utility. It’s possible, for example, that it’d be a poor man’s way to encapsulate some of the salient points the author wanted to convey. We all know people don’t read every word of an article, but rather glance at bullet points, captions, charts, etc. This might be just the ticket to easily display the “bullet points” of a post.
For example, if the MicroReader detected a known format (eg. “hreview“) it could automatically generate a summary panel with the information. With only a few sites actively leveraging the format now, it’d be of little value, but if Yahoo Tech is using them, could mom-n-pop be around the corner?
I’m not really sure if that gets us closer to a semantifying the web, but it’d be kinda’ neat.
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Trent,
your wish is answered. There are in fact several such plug ins. If I put links in the comment will probably get blocked, so you can look for
Operator
WebCards
Tails
Tails Export
Al of which provide this kind of funtionaity, in different ways.
The guys behind WebCards and Operator also have or are going to open source their client side microformat parser, so anyoen can build on top of that, or help improve it.
John
John,
When Trent talked with me about this “MicroReader,” I believed that it was not only about viewing the content in Microformats. I am not a really Microformat person so far (though I am very interested in this technique and am willing to contribute to it). But I am sure that there must have been several of this type of tools that can read content within Microformats since this term has already become so popular now.
I think the main point in the talk between Trent and me is about the use of Microformats on the realm of Web 2.0. It seems to me that right now the Microformat community has more cooperation to the Semantic Web community than to the Web 2.0 community. Though myself does more research on Semantic Web Web 2.0, I believe that Microformat fits better to the Web 2.0 than Semantic Web.
I have read several posts about comparing Microformat with RDF or even OWL. Certainly they share quite a few common features, or maybe the idea of Microformat was initiated to simplify RDF and OWL. But I believe the main contribution of Microformat is not about specifying shallow semantics, which RDF may do much better than Microformat. In contrast, Microformat allows creating HTML-compatible, portable data units that can be uniformly distributed on the web without complex logic supports. Until now, this is what RDF and OWL cannot do easily. This technique fits much better on the realm of Web 2.0 because AJAX faciliates the update of pieces of web resources. Until now, web widgets are the service pieces that have been leveraged by AJAX. And I believe that Microformats are the data pieces that can be leveraged by AJAX.
Yihong