There's an interesting post on "CSS Toys" (hat tip: Ted Drake from Yahoo! posting on the Microformats mailing list) about how to "Add OpenSearch to your website".
If you're unfamiliar with OpenSearch, here's a quick blurb:
OpenSearch is a set of simple formats for the sharing of search results. Any website that has a search feature can make their results available in OpenSearch™ format. Other tools can then read those search results. For example, here is an aggregator that brings together search results from many websites:
This something I can see BlogMatrix doing in the near future, once all the other dust settles.
This brought up the topic of hAtom (my contribution to the world of Microformats) and using this for encoding search results. Here's what I replied:
- according the article, Yahoo only returns its results in HTML, so
- we know HTML is good
- one could add an extra field to the OpenSearch XML (a description
- file about how your results are returned) indicating that the file is
- hAtom
- parties not understanding hAtom can just display HTML
- parties wating to understand hAtom can do it themselves or use a webservice
When I was at MashupCamp in February there was a guy from
A9/OpenSearch very interested in mashup type applications and
developer feedback so there's a door open for us.
I'll also note that his WordPress integration problem will probably go
away if we did this, as an independent XML-feed result will not have
to be returned;
Full disclosure: I got a nice Amazon A9 hat from the conference. If anyone knows his name, please let me know -- the early MashupCamp 1 Wiki information seems to have disappeared.