Icon sprawl for structured information, social bookmarking
. For every combination of structured data and client applications for structured data, there has to be an icon or action that adds visual clutter to the web user interface.
A similar problem appears when considering social bookmarking services like Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, mister-wong.de (a popular german social bookmarking website) and others. Wired News calls this: Battle Over 'Iconistan' due to the increasing number of bookmarking icons that clutter the interface of news sites and weblogs.
Alex Faaborg suggests to solve this problem by implementing a solution in the browser, similar to what has happend with feed support in web browsers: The web browser is able to autodetect the structured information and cares for integrating the client application.
I've got two questions: Will browser development keep pace with the development of structured web formats or will the world have to wait another two years for an update of the world's most widely distributed web browser? And so far I have not seen any proper integration of web-based feed reading services that is supported by the feed autodiscovery feature of web browsers.
One commenter to the Wired News post recommends a wordpress plugin that hides all social bookmarking icons until you click a "share" button, something like a meta-social bookmarking plugin. It could be a solution to have a similar meta-web-service (in the web 2.0 sense, not in the SOA sense) that is able to push structured data to the desired web-based or desktop client.
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>Will browser development keep pace with the development of structured web
>formats or will the world have to wait another two years...
The tentative plan is to build an open extension system around the detection framework. So even if we don't decide to support a new format or application in a point release, users will be able to customize their browser by going to a special microformats section on http://addons.mozilla.org
>so far I have not seen any proper integration of web-based feed reading services
>that is supported by the feed autodiscovery feature of web browsers.
Ideally this same proposed system should solve that problem as well.
Cheers,
-Alex
Posted by Alex Faaborg on December 14, 2006 at 09:11 AM CET #
Posted by Lars Trieloff on December 14, 2006 at 10:05 AM CET #