Read/Write Web is reporting that Firefox 3 (don't forget that 2 just came out) is going to have deep microformats support:

Alex Faaborg explains that microformats will make the Web Browser into an "Information Broker" and suggests that this could happen in Firefox 3. He writes:

"Much in the same way that operating systems currently associate particular file types with specific applications, future Web browsers are likely going to associate semantically marked up data you encounter on the Web with specific applications, either on your system or online. This means the contact information you see on a Web site will be associated with your favorite contacts application, events will be associated with your favorite calendar application, locations will be associated with your favorite mapping application, phone numbers will be associated with your favorite VOIP application, etc."

[...] Mitchell Baker from Mozilla calls this "data-browsing" in another post. And Alex has links to more info on Mozilla's microformats project on this page. I particularly enjoyed this discussion of which microformats Firefox 3 might support. Alex noted in that post:

"Detecting information in Web pages and handing that information off to other applications changes the role of the Web browser from being solely a HTML renderer to being an information broker."

As of now, there is a Firefox addon called Operator, a microformat detection extension developed by Michael Kaply at IBM. So the seeds have started to be sowed.

I tried Operator but I had to uninstall it: it's too much work to trawl through the DOM looking for microformats every time one switches web pages. Perhaps Adobe's gift of an efficient JavaScript engine will improve the situation where we won't care how expensive (within reason) JS programs are.

Here's more from Faaborg: microformats introduction, structured data chaos.

Here's a slideshow (mainly) on what's coming up in Javascript 1.7 and 2. Alas, of not too much use if the Internet Explorer don't sign on.

Update: there's Python-like Iterators, which is pretty cool.

Douglas Crockford proposes that loading JSON documents be moved directly into the browser, in much the same way that XMLHttpRequest is. There are many advantages to this (which Crockford outlines) including increased security and the fact that JSON has become the way to load data into the browser for AJAX applications.

We've done similar work here using the SCRIPT tag to do cross site JSON loading. Crockford's proposal would obsolete this (and we'd be happy about it).

You can read the proposal here. Hopefully some bright Firefox and IE gurus will pick up the torch for this one.

Left Logic has produced a very pretty "Microformats Bookmarklet" that will extract hCard and hCalendar events from a webpage.

Frequently test against Internet Explorer.

A few notable differences between Firefox and Internet Explorer (v7 beta) for this website:

• There's supposed to be a diagram in this post (works on IE, not FF)
• The sidebar is supposed to have little dividing lines, not huge white bars (works on FF, not IE)

We're planning to go "really" live soon, so no rest for the weary.