Filed under: Awards, Extentions, Newsflash, Plugins, Recommended Sites, Tech news, Tools
If you’re wondering “What on Earth are Microformats?” – where have you been? A quick search on Google returns 11.7million results!
Very brief explanation. For designers it means instead of using random/made-up class names for content you want to style, you use names listed in the Microformat specification. This gives the content you are styling more meaing which can then be read by appropriate software. The class now not only allows you to style that content/element as usual, but also means an application that reads Microformats can “understand” what that content is.
The easiest example to explain is with a contact us page. If Microformat classes are used correctly a Microformat application can differentiate a name, an email address, a telephone number etc. For a user this means when wanting to make a note of someone’s contact details rather than opening up your address book and manually copy and pasting each detail you can click your Microformats button, pick the name you want, view the business card and add it straight to your address book. You could even add all contacts on the page at once. This also works if the information is dispersed through the page such as a biography page containing contact information spread out through the paragraphs, microformats can collate this data into one tidy hcard. This is just one application. Imagine the other posibilities – adding events directly to your calender, XFN relationships, enhanced searches etc.
This is mostly theory at the moment as there are very few websites (Flickr, Technorati, d.construct) that feature this new technique and even fewer applications taking advantage of it (tails, greasemonkey, Safari favelets). However, with the stir being generated about this and the backing it’s receiving it won’t be long before it’s as big as RSS. There is already a Firefox extention called Tails that can read microfomats and Tails export allows you to export the business cards or calendar events (Tails Export is currently only compatible with Firefox 1.5 or older). There are also a few GreaseMonkey Scripts and plugins for IE and Safari.
To see the latest news on which websites or applications make use of Microformats check out the official Microformats.org
website. Microformats are actually a more advanced than I’ve explained here, read more at the official site to get the full picture.
This brings me to the topic of this post – Microformats on ZDNet. If you have the Tails Firefox extention or another application that reads Microformats visit the ZDNet.co.uk contact us page to see Microformats at work. To avoid spammers harvesting email addresses individual contact email addresses are not shown, instead the instruction to use firstname.surname@domain.com is given. However, if you are using a Microformats reader the business card generated still presents the correct email address for each contact. The embedded Microformats was developed by James Myers (a CNET Networks Producer) and myself. James Myers has been interviewed on the subject which will appear on the site as a podcast and video shortly.
This is another example of ZDNet being leader in new technologies. For this reason I am very pleased to present ZDNet.co.uk with the very first FFE (From the Front End) Award. Congratulations to the ZDNet design team on the FFE Award for Best use of new technology on a Business Website. You can view all awards presented by FFE on the Awards page. Three more Awards were given out during the Podcast with Reinette “Ray” De Silva which was recorded last week. James Myers also modestly awarded another site an Award for best use of Microformats in his interview. These will be added to the award page when the Podcast goes live.
If you need any help viewing microformats in your Firefox, IE or Safari please post a comment and I’ll try and help out if I can. Please include your browser name and version.
Seems every tech blog in the land has picked up on the hot release of the week – Firefox 2.0. I heard a lot of good things about it while still in Beta and I finally got round to giving it a spin today.
IE7 also saw a new release this week but got a lot less attention/praise (unless you work for Microsoft) as it didn’t offer much extra compared to RC1 which I already had installed. Opera’s latest release has impressed as it’s the first browser to pass the Acid2 test.
So is FF2.0 worth the download. Well if you haven’t got Firefox at all it’s an obvious yes. Once you’ve tried Firefox for a couple of weeks you’ll find it a frustrating experience to try and browse the web with anything less. However, I am sure I’m preaching to the converted so I’ll focus on What’s New in 2.0.
Firstly upgrading was a doddle. I was concerned about loosing settings or my favorite extentions but most of my favourite settings and extentions are now built in to Firefox as standard. Most of the other custom extentions were updated during the beta so it was a simple matter of running the update for them when prompted asI opened FF2.0 for the first time.
Improved Tabbed Browsing
Tabbed browsing was one the best features Forefox had to offer when it came out. Since then it has caught on in a big way. I typically have 10 or more tabs open at a time so this new release has enhanced the tabs further for me. Now each tab has it’s own close button instead of having to view the tab and click close at the end of the tab row (you can of course still middle-click to close but handy for when I’m in an internet café with a no/broken middle button/scroll wheel)
Remember cursing when you accidently closed the wrong tab. Now the new History menu option allows you to restore recently closed tabs. Not only is the tab restored but any text you were filling in forms. A life saver when you close you blog page without saving. This often happened when I had been working with a large number of tabs and couldn’t see enough of the title to see which tab was which. Now FF2.0 has a handy button at the end of the tab row (where the close button used to be) which when clicked shows a drop-down list of all the open tabs with their favicon and title.
Improved RSS support
Viewing the xml RSS feed was always difficult to read in fact I never bothered. Just copied the url for whatever purpose I needed the feed for. Now when you view a feed page Firefox styles the xml for you so there are legible titles, text, and links. At the top of the page it also gives you the option to create a live bookmark for the page or add the feed to bloglines, google reader or Yahoo. It also gives you the option of other so you can use you favourite reader if not already listed.
Faster Browsing
One thing that will benefit all users regardless of whether they are a power user or not is that Firefox 2.0 is less resource hungry and is actually faster. Faster to open, faster to open tabs and even load pages in cases. Despite the improvement you can tweak things further. Firefox prefetches pages by following links on a page before you click them. If you click the link the page loads very quickly as it’s already downloaded, however, if you don’t click a link to a page it’s prefetched for you it’s wasted bandwidth and cpu cycles. If you ISP has a bandwidth cap or you want to reduce the load on your cpu then you can disable this feature. You can also cap the amount of ram ff uses. See the about:config section below for more info.
More Customiseable
Firefox was already highly customiseable. With the huge selection of themes, settings and extentions already available in FF1.5 no two people seemed to have the same looking and functioning Firefox. Version 2.0 takes it further with enough tweakable elements to please even the most fussy. See some examples in the about:config section below.
Session Restore
I loved the session restore extention and now this is built in to 2.0. When you close/crash Firefox you don’t lose all the pages you were viewing. Re-open the browser and everything is restored the way you left it, even half completed forms. To turn this feature on choose Tools > Options > under Main tab there is the option – When Firefox Starts: – choose Show my Windows and Tabs from the last time.
Intergrated Spell Checker
I believe this was in version 1.5 but I didn’t notice or use it until 2.0. Now you can set it to spell check single line form fields aswell as large text areas.
Better intergration with Search engines
In previous versions of Firefox you could add search engines to the top right window of your browser but this has now been improved. FireFox now detects if a page has a search facility and gives you the option to add it to your list of search tools. It also adds ajax powered search like Google Suggest. This means as you type it will suggest search terms using a combination of your past search entries (i.e. autocomplete) and using AJAX to search the search engines results/database.
about: config
By typing about:config into your address bar you can view a huge list of tweakable elements within Firefox. Rather than me explain away each feature check out some highlights on lifehacker.com
A more detailed item by item describtion can be found on MozillaZine.
So what are you waiting for? Get FireFox 2.0 now!
