Microformats: Firefox Add-on

Sebastian Küpers has written a very good article (in German, though) on the Firefox add-on Operator which detects and processes microformats.

After installation and re-starting Firefox you will see the Operator toolbar that offers two modes to work with. The first mode is called Actions:

operator toolbar actionmode

As you can see Operator has detected one contact and six tags. You can export the contact or look for the tags on Flickr, Del.icio.us or Technorati.

The second mode is called Microformats:

operator toolbar microformats mode

The contact can be exported to Microsoft’s Live Clipboard (very interesting technology, check it out), as a Firefox Bookmark, as a Yahoo contact, to a website or as a vCard. Also you can look for bookmarks on Del.icio.us, photos on Flickr, events on Upcoming or blogs on Technorati.

Operator supports the following microformats: hCard, hCalendar, hReview, tag and geo. Supported services are: Del.icio.us, Flickr, Upcoming, Technorati, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Yahoo Contact, Yahoo Calendar and Live Clipboard.

This is an excellent add-on which is demonstrating how powerful microformats are and what you can do with them. I am sure other formats will be supported in future releases.

It would be great, though, if users were able to add more services and customise the add-on themselves. I want to have 30 Boxes as the calendar application for example. Another minor complaint: there should be an option to decide if users want to have the toolbar or rather the information displayed in the status bar or even a context menu solution. There are too many toolbars around.

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  • http://www.kaply.com/weblog/ Michael Kaply

    > It would be great, though, if users were able to add more
    > services and customise the add-on themselves.

    This support is there. It was in the announcement but everyone missed it.

    Check out my latest blog post at http://www.kaply.com/weblog/ for how to do this.

    I haven’t had a chance to do 30 Boxes support yet.

  • http://www.kaply.com/weblog/ Michael Kaply

    > It would be great, though, if users were able to add more
    > services and customise the add-on themselves.

    This support is there. It was in the announcement but everyone missed it.

    Check out my latest blog post at http://www.kaply.com/weblog/ for how to do this.

    I haven’t had a chance to do 30 Boxes support yet.

  • Carsten Pötter

    Thanks for the comment, Michael. Yes, I have missed the announcement. I have read your blog post by now. Good to see it is an open concept. Well done.

  • Carsten Pötter

    Thanks for the comment, Michael. Yes, I have missed the announcement. I have read your blog post by now. Good to see it is an open concept. Well done.

  • http://www.notsorelevant.com/2007-01-02/microformats-and-firefox-3/ Microformats and Firefox 3 at Not So Relevant

    [...] Alex starts off explaining microformats and linking to wikis and tutorials on Microformats.org, then describes various other types of structured data that can be found on the net (eg. RSS and iCal). In part three of the article series he draws a very appealing picture of the browser becoming an Information Broker that is more than just a HTML rendering tool but rather actively manages various microformats and directs them to the appropriate applications, either online or offline. Finally he introduces readers to the Operator add-on for Firefox which I have covered here. [...]

  • http://www.kaply.com/weblog/?p=1 Mike’s Musings » Blog Archive » Adding handlers to Operator

    [...] So far, the response has been great. Here are some posts from LouderVoice blog, microformatique, wizardishungry/blog, guillermoesteves.com, pixelsebi’s repository (in German), and Not So Relevant. [...]

  • Floroskop

    Hello!
    I think this try.

  • Floroskop

    Hello!
    I think this try.

  • Simon B.

    That toolbars complaint — I’d guess you can move some useful buttons/icons to after your address bar. (I make space by removing the build-in print home buttons).

  • Simon B.

    That toolbars complaint — I’d guess you can move some useful buttons/icons to after your address bar. (I make space by removing the build-in print home buttons).

  • Carsten Pötter

    It doesn’t really solve the toolbar problem, does it? I can’t move it.

  • Carsten Pötter

    It doesn’t really solve the toolbar problem, does it? I can’t move it.

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