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.

Kevin Marks reports:

I made an initial conversion to hAtom by hand in the meantime, but a few weeks back Michał Cierniak and I checked in a change to the underlying Blogger templates to make hAtom the default, which the Blogger team graciously accepted. This should enable much simpler client-side parsing of the blog pages.

Kevin has more details on how to add this to your template if you're using new-style Blogger templates. Here's a note I sent to the Blogger mailing list when someone raised the "what good is it" question:

Just to clarify, hAtom was never intended to be a "syndication format"
nor to compete with Atom or RSS. It's simply designed to describe the
microcontent on webpages, such as blog posts. We used Atom because it
provides a well-defined nomenclature for describing such elements.

What can you do with it? You could provide search results that narrow
into the exact content on a page, rather that keywords that were found
elsewhere on a page. You can write tools, such as entry pretty
printers, or "reblogging" tools for quoting posts that work
universally across hAtom blogs, rather than depending on the author/
publisher to provider this for you. Because it effectively
standardizes CSS elements for blog posts, you can write CSS that works
across all hAtom conforming blogs. You can combine with other
microformats or "POSH" HTML to associate data displayed on a page
(say, the geographic location of where a post was made) with the exact
post it belongs to.

In and off themselves not earth shattering perhaps, but not bad for
standardizing a half-dozen or so tags with minimal effort for
publishers.

All templates in the BlogMatrix Platform are hAtom compliant.

Operator 0.7 is available. Apparently it has hAtom support, which I'll have to check out.

I've started a new page on the microformats wiki to discuss an "item" microformat, to represent physical things. This comes from this conversation.

I've been down this road before; I'm the author of the hAtom microformat for representing microcontent.

Google is in the process of revamping the way Blogger.com works. Chris writes:

Hello,

Not sure to whom I should address this request, but I’m very excited about the Blogger Beta and that it represents an open opportunity to add support for microformatted content.

You can read more about microformats at microformats.org, but to summarize, microformats are community-developed standards for identifying certain kinds of information in webpages using your typical HTML tags and classes.

In particular, this is my wishlist of microformats that I would love to see Blogger support:

• rel-tag: okay, you already took care of this one, so kudos!
• XFN: WordPress already supports this, and it’s especially useful for representing lists of friends in blogrolls.
• rel-me: from the XFN family, being able to link to other pages on the web using rel=”me” creates an informal means of “claiming” other places where I publish online. Read about Ma.gnolia’s addition of rel-me.
• hCard: marking up personal profiles in hcard means that if I add personal contact details, people can click a link to add me to their address book without any extra typing. I’ve done this on my main blog. Clicking the “Add me to your address book” link will convert the HTML content in that page into a .vcf file that most address book programs can recognize.
• hCalendar: In order to make it easy for my readers to add events that I’ve blogged about to their calendars (Google Calendar or others, like iCal), I can use hcalendar to mark up this information with a link to add the events to their calendar. Here’s an example.
• hAtom: This one is fairly simple to implement since you’re already classing most of this information already. hAtom uses element names from Atom as class names. This allows people to subscribe to blogs directly, without the need to subscribe to RSS. You can read more about this.

Though the benefits may not seem immediately obvious to supporting microformats, the amount of effort required to add support is fairly minimal compared with other, more substantial features that you’re probably already working on. Furthermore, our community would be happy to help with the process of adding support to Blogger, validating your work and providing guidance along the way. This initiative is also not a commercial effort; rather, it represents the work of a large, distributed, worldwide community that wants to build out the value of the “lowercase semantic web” and to make data storage in web pages a reality.

In some respects, we are at a chicken-and-egg crossroads but the more support that we see for microformats in the wild, the more tool makers, publishers, browsers and other applications will reap the benefits of this effort to essentially modernize the web, incrementally building upon the existing infrastructure.

Thanks for your consideration and please let me know if there is any way that I can be of service.

Chris

We fully endorse this letter and in particular would like to make the case for getting hAtom into the template process ASAP:

• hAtom identifies almost all the commonly used elements in blog posts.
  
• standardizing around hAtom class names will make it easier for designers to modify and understand templates. Actions, such as "print this post" can use a shared printing CSS file, as it will inherently understand how all posts are structured.
• standardizing around hAtom class names will make it easier for search companies -- such as Google! -- to understand that a page contains blog posts, what part of the page conatains the blog posts and what isn't part of the blog post. This will make search results within blogs more accurate by giving the ability to ignore "incidental matches" where one blog posts matches but (for example) some other non-important term in the sidebar matches also
• standardizing around hAtom class names will make it easy to do "reblogging" -- that is, quote part of the content of one blog post into another post -- thus making it easier to create blogging communities and blogging conversarions
• as new templates tend to be created from existing templates, the greatest benefit for adding hAtom to Blogger templates would be to do this as early as possible in the development/roll-out cycle

Updated (2006.09.05):

• machine-readable weblog archives (tip: Danny Ayers); this would be especially powerful if combined with a directory of posts (OPML/XOXO) or a microformat for marking weblog archive structure
• Winer-style "river of news" pages can be made with a simple one-stop XSLT transformation

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.

Singpolyma at the XOXO Blog has written a tool to convert hAtom, Atom, XOXO blog format and RSS into "standard RSS" (you can read his brief comments about it here).  It's written using Ning, which is pretty impressive -- I assume they're just letting him run PHP scripts.

The template for this blog should be hAtom compatible, so if you do this you shoud see RSS. Alas, you do not. I'm not going to mess with the templates right now because we have a new L&F coming out of our design shop any day now and I'll spend the effort there.

Disclosure: I'm responsible for the original hAtom spec!