What is Digg?35 Comments
- flare8899, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Mine doesn't crash, maybe it's your setup.
- JorgeGT, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7As far as I know, Microsoft Office has a similar feature called SmartTags: for example, it recognizes IS units and offers you converters.
Also it recognizes addresses and telephone numbers (you can then mail them, show them in a map...) and stock tickers (in Excel) whose live information can be retrieved from MSN Money.
(from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA010347451033.aspx )
I would love to see such features implemented in a browser!
PS: Have you noticed how they just put symbols in the graphic? Is it bad when you instantly know what symbol means, doctor? - Otto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I don't follow that one at all. It's about making webpages understandable in human terms so as to provide better integration. How does this have any security implications at all?
- vraicovi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+52.0 was a nightmare, but 2.0.0.1 seemed to clear up the lockups. I was having issues on XP & OSX.
From what I've read and my experience , I'd say you've got something else causing you problems. - schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5There are some JavaScript extensions that can extract information of use and perform analysis upon it. Certain semantic information can be extracted with confidence (stock symbols are fairly easy and these become popular in financial sites). It often does not require human interaction/annotation. I would love to see a semantic Wikipedia. Britannica could never compete with hyperlinks. Semantics would kill old-skool encyclopedias for good. Also, pay attention to Jimbo Wales' latest project. Goodbye to spamming for SERP placements!
- Otto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Well, yes, okay, I can follow you there. However, in order for the content to be extracted at all, it has to be there in the first place. And face facts, contact information is not really secret material anymore. We tried not giving out real email addresses. Spammers get them anyway. We tried not exposing real addresses and phone numbers. Mass mailers and telemarketers get them anyway. Making it easier for real people to use the information you provide can only be a good thing. Yes, with the good uses come the possible bad uses, but you have to deal with those bad uses in some other fashion. Telemarketers calling you a lot? No-call lists. Spammers? Spam blockers. Mass mailings filling your mailbox? Well... fire is the only good solution I have for that one, but still, there are probably solutions to that as well.
- radicaldementia, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Only in certain cases. It's unfortunate that the most common example of microformats is for contact information. In reality, microformats can be applied to any type of information. The idea is to use special values for the "class" and "rel" attributes of html tags to label text. This way an automated system can easily parse a page and extract semantic information. So its only a security problem when the information is personal, like contact lists, but in general this is definitely a step in the right direction.
- itanshi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4it's not the same thing if you read the article. they are making it so you can assign any program you wish to the 'smart tags' and not a biased set.
- avsa, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4you are misunderstanding the issue. What Office does is use machine intelligence to try to extract information aout of a text string. It's clever, but microformats are another different thing: they are code in the html page that state what info is there.
Microformats do not rely in machine intelligence, but in humans making web pages more useful. - vraicovi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I think that this will have great potential. From the article, it sounds a lot like what Skype does with phone numbers on web pages; it transfers information from one app to another. I wouldn't think that it would be too much of a security problem, assuming the API of the service your moving data to supports it. I would assume this would be the case due the modularity of Firefox. It's not like you're going to provide Firefox with your login information for every service you use. I would assume it would ask you to authenticate at the time of the data transfer.
- avsa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2you don't seem to have thought thru what you said. Microformat is a way to put some information on a site you own. You decide what information you put online: firefox is just making retrieving that information more easily
- OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This particular feature wouldn't slow it down.
- Tanath, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Obviously. How about one (or two) click shortcuts for if you do, though?
- OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2[quote]Microsoft's proposal to add these to IE was met with criticism[/quote]
That's because Microsoft's solutions tend to be proprietary and anticompetitive. MS has burned way too many companies and developers in the past to be considered trustworthy. Their evil schemes are rather obvious anyway. - SimonGray, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I have the same problem.
- ScottMaximus1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1sounds like your problem dude.
- JaYBrooks, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Why cant we just focus on making a browser efficient? Whats with the swiss army knife software?
- Tanath, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You don't need to be near a computer... you can have alerts sent to your cell phone for instance. And contacts and events aren't the only things this is useful for. Use a little imagination.
- chrisrowe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1From what I gather from this it allows the web-browser to "understand" the data which is being conveyed in the HTML and rather than render it in the document send the data out to another application to use. I might be wrong...
How does this help anything, and isn't this functionality already partly being used with links to other protocols, for example, viewing a phone number on a web page and linking that number with a URL callto:555123 will allow the operating system to decide how to handle the phone number, eg boot up skype and pass the number on for skype to call.
I really don't see how this benefits the end user? - andreas1999, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@error792:
But the programmers wouldn't put vcard information on that page! unless they wanted to for some reason, and even if they add class="vcard" then it's still up to you to tell the browser what to do with it. So, unless you installed some malicious software (firefox extension perhaps?) that sends all vcards it finds off to the spammers then you should be alright. - stalefries, on 10/12/2007, -6/+6How about realizing that you're running, at best, alpha-quality software?
- faaborg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0>Hence the constant reinvention of the wheel in the form of proprietary "extensions".
Absolutely nothing about Mozilla's potential support of microformats is proprietary. Microformats are defined by an open community (www.microformats.org), and are based on HTML classes and the "rel" attribute. The detection of microformats (if implemented) will be a completely open and extensible system.
>hardly any browser is built to recognize them
That is precisely the problem that Mozilla is currently exploring solutions to. - error792, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Also as stated, security information could be divulged. I take courses online, and when you login, your username and password are prominently displayed on the page. I realize this is the fault of incompetent programmers, and not of Mozilla, but that doesn't mitigate the danger in any way.
(Sorry for double-post, tried editing but ran out of time before I finished) - gr00vy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1This might be cool, but I don't think that I have ever browsed a page in the last 10 years where I have needed to do this. I did add a movie date once using the button on a website. But at the end of the day, I am not around the computer when I needed to be reminded of this. But I cannot think of any given case at all, where this is the functionality I need.
- error792, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Firstly, I do NOT want my browser saving information of sites I visit all over my computer without my knowledge. As stated, a lot of information can be personal, which you do not want others to see. It's like the AOL search results leak. (I know most people will at this point be thinking of pornography, but there are other instances in which you don't want others to know where you've been online, e.g. researching illnesses you are worried you may have.)
Furthermore, I imagine that you'd see some sort of "Microformat Injection" attacks - microformat information that, when saved into another application, runs malicious code. - Arancaytar, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1RSS feeds already have this in the form of the <category> Identifier, and HTML (sort of) in the "keywords" meta tag and the "rel" attribute of links. It's just that hardly anybody uses them on their site, and hardly any browser is built to recognize them. There are other standards like this floating around that nobody seems to know about because few people bother to read the full specs.
Hence the constant reinvention of the wheel in the form of proprietary "extensions". - MWeather, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0That's not a similar feature any more than a car that runs on gasoline is similar to a car that runs on any fuel source.
- pollardito, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0the only security implication that i can think of is that if your browser is already compromised a harvester within the browser will know what parts of the [presumably private] webpages you're viewing to phone home with, rather than trying to filter important stuff by format (exactly what the microformats try to make easy) or sending everything
- chaoskaizer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Why we should write code readable by bot instead of human.
- JQP123, on 10/12/2007, -6/+3"As far as I know, Microsoft Office has a similar feature called SmartTags ..."
Yes, it looks like SmartTags reborn. How innovative. Microsoft's proposal to add these to IE was met with criticism over privacy and security concerns so it was made an optional download that few have ever used. - tommah, on 10/12/2007, -9/+4This sounds like a security nightmare.
- meez, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2My first thoughts exactly. There is a reason these are often kept separate with different passwords.
- guardsman85, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1I don't know that I'd want every single email address, mailing address, phone number, calendar, etc. that I came across online automatically loaded into my address book, calendar, etc.
- Dunkelzahn, on 10/12/2007, -17/+2How about making Firefox 3 not crash five times a day like 2 does?
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