[a quick rundown of my proposed initial feature set for microsummary support in Firefox, complete with sample code and screenshots from the prototype; for more information, check out the proposal, the newsgroup thread, my original blog post, and my followup post]
A microsummary is a succinct compilation of the most important information on a web page, f.e. the ticker symbol and price for a stock quote page.
TWX: 17.07
A microsummary generator is a simple XML snippet telling Firefox how to generate a microsummary for a set of pages.
<generator xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/microsummaries/0.1" name="Yahoo! Finance Stock Quote">
<pages>
<include>http://finance.yahoo.com/q\?.*s=[a-zA-Z]+</include>
</pages>
<template>
<xsl:transform xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="text"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:value-of select="substring-before(substring-after(string(id('yfncsubtit')/tbody/tr/td[1]/b), '('), ')')"/>
<xsl:text>: </xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="id('yfncsumtab')/tbody/tr/td/table[3]/tbody/tr[2]/td[1]/table/tbody/tr/td/table/tbody/tr[1]/td[2]/big/b"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:transform>
</template>
</generator>
Generators can be built into Firefox, and they can also be installed from web sites, just like search engines.
Once installed, users can choose a microsummary when adding or modifying a bookmark. If multiple summaries are available for the page, users can choose between them, and they can always choose to just display the standard bookmark name instead.
Once chosen, the microsummary shows up in the bookmarks toolbar (and perhaps other places bookmarks are displayed). Firefox updates the microsummary regularly to keep it up-to-date.
Pages can point to their microsummary, or to a generator that will generate their microsummary, via a <link> tag:
<link rel="microsummary" href="generator-for-this-page.xml">
<link rel="microsummary" href="microsummary-for-this-page.txt">Users can also build their own microsummaries, containing both snippets from the page and arbitrary text, via a microsummary editor that highlights text nodes on the page and lets users drag and drop them into a microsummary editing widget.
