356440 - Firefox should be able to create microsummaries without need for embedment in webpage

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: Microsummaries, enhancement)

Description

[Steve England [:stevee]]

Microsummaries are pretty cool, but at the moment only webpages that have a microsummary embedded in them can use this feature easily. If a website doesn't supply a microsummary then you are able to write one yourself and then add it manually to your firefox profile dir, etc.

Both these ways are unnecessarily cumbersome. The first way (a microsummary embedded into a website) means that the webmaster must provide the microsummary themselves. Do they want to? Can they be bothered to? Will they microsummarize the information the end user wants? Is it worth their time if no one knows about/uses microsummaries?

The second way (writing it yourself and manually getting it into firefox) is technically difficult and not something that your average end user will ever bother with.

So what's the alternative? How about firefox generating the microsummary code for the end user itself!

I imagine it would work something along these lines: An end user reading a website highlights some text and then click Bookmarks > Add Microsummary Bookmark. A bookmark is created pointing at the URL, and the Microsummary would be the highlighted text. The dialog for Add Microsummary Bookmark might also contain a way of setting the update interval for the microsummary (firefox default currently 30 mins, with a minimum interval of one minute allowed).

This would encourage use of microsummaries by all people, irregardless of whether the website you were microsummarizing cared about firefox or microsummaries or not. It would allow end users to easily make their own microsummaries for their own purposes. It would also not be much of a UI hit; an extra item in the Bookmarks menu, an extra item on the right click context menu and probably an updated Bookmarks dialog to allow the user to change the update frequency if making a microsummary.

There's no need for websites to have to provide the microsummary for firefox - empower the users instead!

Comment 1

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

I think this is an excellent idea.  I'd love to see something like this implemented as an extension, ideally one that works with Firefox 2.0, so that folks could get exposure to the functionality and provide useful feedback to drive its development.

Note the Microsummary Generator Builder extension, which does something like this (but presents a more robust set of options and may be geared more towards power users than the regular users this bug report seems to be targeting):

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3741/

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

- BUGSPAM -
Wontfixing all Microsummaries bugs, since the feature has been removed from the core product and previous versions won't get further fixes for it.
If interested in supporting Microsummaries in your add-on, you're free to use our old microsummaries code and to search all previously open bugs by looking for [microsummaries-feature-removal] in the status whiteboard field.