MMMeeja

Internet Explorer 8 beta has an interesting new feature: hSlice support.

An hSlice is a small chunk of a web page that you can subscribe to with your browser, like RSS but for a section of a page instead of the whole thing. The most obvious application of this technology is for e-commerce sites so you can wait for prices to drop or stock levels to replenish before placing an order but I have no doubt that once the technology gains wider adoption, a wide range of interesting and unpredicted applications will emerge outside of the e-commerce arena.

Will hSlices Be Adopted?

Yes. The idea is a good one and it should appeal to people who already use RSS. The are already a number of Firefox extensions that are bringing hSlice support to the geeks’ favourite browser.

Hopefully, RSS aggregators like Google Reader and NewsGator will add hSlice support soon and then widget systems like iGoogle will quickly follow. The other major browsers should be able to add hSlice support without too much development effort since they all have RSS support and Safari already does something quite similar with web snippets.

A hugely important difference between RSS/Atom feeds and hSlices is that the former are (usually) used to indicate new pages being added to web sites, whilst hSlices show changes to an existing page. Stop and think about that for a moment, that’s a massively important change and it will have an impact on every aspect of the web.

But It’s A Microsoft Standard And They Are Evil!

Calm down dear, your tinfoil hat is slipping.

Seriously, I think there is a need for this technology and, as I said, Apple are doing something similar with Safari’s web snippets. The microformats.org mail discussion list has given a tentative welcome to the new arrival, but pointed out that it would have been nicer to be involved in the naming/design.

It’s good to see Microsoft actually innovating on the web, instead of playing catch-up with the open sourcerers and it’s particularly gratifying to see that innovation taking the form of an open standard.

hSlice Markup

Adding hSlices to your HTML is pretty straight forward, though you’ll need to update the server code to serve updates. Just as with serving hAtom (and most other microformats), you add classes to standard HTML tags, like this:

<div class="hslice" id="1234">
<p class="entry-title">Buy 1 doz eggs</p>
<p class="entry-content"><img src="eggs.jpg" alt="Eggs"/> £2.68 per dozen</p>
<a rel="feedurl" href="http://www.mmmeeja.com/slice-1234.xml">Subscribe to Feed</a>
</div> 

There can be more than one slice per page but each must have a unique ID.

The “feedurl” anchor is optional and, if it is not present, clients are expected to download the entire page and extract the hSlice using its ID.

So, my feeling on hSlice should be pretty clear by now. I don’t care that it’s from Microsoft, it’s going to make for some exciting new web tools and technologies.

DO WANT!

Creative Commons licensed photo by petoo.