Microsoft is adding something to IE 8 called “webslices”. A webslice is a part of a webpage that updates and can be subscribed to – for example, a weather forecast.

A webslice is different that a syndication feed because:

1. it’s part of a webpage, rather than an independent feed (though it can have an independent feed also)
2. it’s a single thing that updates, as opposed to a pipe that new things (such as blog posts) are coming down one after the other

You can read the webslices spec on this page and brief commentary here.

Now, what makes this interesting to me is that it’s based on the hAtom microformat (which I authored and championed). It’s based but unfortunately it’s not the hAtom microformat, as they add their own top level concept, the “hslice”.

Now, I can understand to some degree why Microsoft did this:

• a webslice is the concept of a feed with a single item that’s continually being updated
• hAtom requires an “author” element
• hAtom requires an “updated” or “created” element
• people think that hAtom is about weblogs – but it’s not true.

These issues are addressable. hAtom 0.2 is going to drop the requirement for the “author” element – it will be assumed to be some value (what, we’re not sure yet) if it’s not physically present. hAtom isn’t about weblogs – it’s about semantically marking up microcontent – and so is entirely applicable to webslices.

The “updated/created” issue is a little tougher. Allow me to suggest that if not present, these default to now, and leave it up to parsers to figure out if things have changed. This will together with the time-to-live (ttl) element MS is proposing in the spec.

I humbly suggest then that MS change the webslice spec so that instead of looking like this:

<div class="hslice" id="1">
 <p class="entry-title">Item - $66.00</p>
 <div class="entry-content">high bidder: buyer1
 …
</div>
</div>

they make it look like this

<div class="hfeed hentry" id="1">
 <p class="entry-title">Item - $66.00</p>
 <div class="entry-content">high bidder: buyer1
 …
</div>
</div>

That is, change “hslice” to “hfeed hentry”. The beauty of this is that there’ll be no reason now why all the tools MS develops for working with webslices will also work with any page that contains hAtom.

If they’re interest in only seeing items that narrowly conform to the webslices spec (i.e. single item feeds), they can just look for single item feeds with no created/updated/author fields. But I think they should go all out and recognize all hAtom items and incidentally help put together the semantic web.