IE8: Web Slices – Keep yourself updated!

Sanket Bakshi — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 21:36:00 GMT

Another amazing feature that IE 8 has pulled out of the hat is – the Web Slices. Today, a very common way of keeping the visitors updated about what's happening on your website is using the RSS. However, maintaining these feeds usually require the websites to duplicate the data access in multiple locations – on the page as well as on the RSS feeds.

With the IE 8 web slices feature, your web site customers can now subscribe to parts of the web page which they would want to get updated about. Areas within a particular webpage can be marked as a web slice by the web developers when creating the sites.

These web slices can then be subscribed to by the web site visitors. Subscribing is as simple as clicking the green web slice button on the IE 8 toolbar when you visit the site. Once subscribed, that area can be accessible and visible through the Favorites menu. In other words you don't have to go to the website every time to see what's updated.

The possibilities are end-less – You might want to keep yourself updated about the new releases on the codeplex, or just get the latest news right in your browser window, or even watch out for the stock that you bought last week.

Web Slices for Web Developers

It is quite amazing how simple it is to build discoverable web slices for the web developers. The web slices is based on the hAtom.Microformat with a few additional properties. It uses the HTML tags with specific properties & classes to create a section of the web page that can be subscribed to. IE 8 detects the web slices by scanning for elements that use the class hSlice, have a unique id property and have at least one child using the class entry-title.

To try this out real quick – here is how you can develop your web page. Once you have your web page ready with content, determine which sections you need to expose as web slices. For those sections, simply wrap them in a div as –

<h2 class="entry-title">My Web Slice Title</h2>

<!-- My dynamic content goes here à

</div>

Whenever visitors visits this page in IE8, they will be able to subscribe to this web slice by clicking on the green web slice button in the IE8 toolbar. Alternatively, they can also hover over to content to get the web slice button right besides it.

The web slices offer a lot of flexibility in terms of controlling the update frequency or providing an alternative data source to update, etc. This article on MSDN covers the web slices in a good details.

Happy Browsing,

--Sanket

IE 8: The onset of an amazing browsing experience

Sanket Bakshi — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:58:43 GMT

OK. So there has already been a lot of buzz about the amazing features that IE 8 now has to offer for the ultimate browsing experience.
There are some articles out there which go ga-ga over the awesome feature set and then there are others who say that Microsoft is just catching up with the other players already in the market. Well, for this post, I leave the decision to you. I recently installed the IE8 and am enjoying the amazing feature set it has to offer. As I go on with exploring the features, do expect further post to contain a lot more details.

Some of the cool feature-lets (that's a term I came up with – it just says – a small feature) that I found right on the first look –

Starting with what I do the most – searching. Yes that's enhanced. The top right hand instant search box is a lot friendlier and provides real time suggestions and images. I choose to search from Wikipedia and it also gives me the related images in the search – that's so awesome. Well, for those who have earned the MS critiques reputation – you can always go ahead and choose the search provider you want.
OK. So what's next? Looking for an address? No more copy pasting of the address into the live maps (or the G* maps) anymore. Simply highlight the address and click on the blue button that appears above & hover on "Map with Live Search". That's it. You get your address located in the live maps. Well, I hear you all – it allows choosing the mapping service that you like.
There is a whole bunch of things related to "in-private" browsing. It allows you to browse in a private session. Any pages that you browse in here do not end up having the cookies lingering on your machine after the browser session. That's browsing with no trail left behind. I leave it upto your imagination on how you would want to use this feature. ;)
Another cool feature-let, it groups the pages together. For instance, let's say you are researching about "Oslo" (not Norway's Capital, but the amazing new Microsoft technology) & "How Diet Pepsi is made?" in the same browser window. Now whenever you open the pages in the new window from any of these tabs, the browser detects the thread and relates all the tabs together with a single color. So now you can quickly make out if a given tab is for Oslo or for Diet Pepsi.
Apart from this, there are a bunch of security related features that would ensure that you are always protected from the malicious software lurking on. And still more features that allow the developers to provide exciting features that you will discover along the way. I will cover those in separate posts.

Seems Interesting? Well, why don't you try it out for yourself? Microsoft has just released the RC1 bits for IE8. You can download it here.

Let me know what you think about this.

Happy Browsing,
-- Sanket

The dot before the Net : IE8

IE8: Web Slices – Keep yourself updated!

IE 8: The onset of an amazing browsing experience