358105 - enable pages to specify microsummaries within the pages themselves

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: Microsummaries, enhancement)

Description

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

Currently, a page that wants to specify its microsummary has to point to a different resource which contains the microsummary instead of merely inlining the microsummary within the page itself.

This is intentional, as microsummaries are much smaller than the pages they summarize, and hosting them at a separate resource significantly reduces the burden on the server of loading those microsummaries.

But in some cases sites may prefer the ease of inlining to the reduced load of hosting separately, and we should make it possible for sites to make that choice.

I see two possibilities for how we could do this:

1. We could allow a page to specify that its title is its microsummary
   (in which case we would use it much as we already use page titles
   for labeling bookmarks, except that we would regularly check it for changes
   and update bookmarks accordingly).

2. We could define a type of meta tag for specifying a microsummary.

Comment 1

[Andy Mabbett]

This would especially benefit smaller, low traffic sites, and those built by hand.

For instance, on http://www.westmidlandbirdclub.com/new.htm I would be happy to include the "last updated" sate in a microsummary.

I prefer option 2, using a meta tag.

Comment 2

[Ian Macfarlane]

What we did on local social networking site itsmymarket.com was add an &microsummary=1 URL parameter to each page, which instead of displaying the page, just displayed the microsummary. It was ideal to do it that way, because we could re-use all the existing data knowledge built into the page to generate it, which made it quite simple to implement.

This is a good alternative solution, but it has the downside of requiring server-side scripting. Still, we could suggest it as a method for sites to use in the meantime, if they wanted to do this, before this bug gets fixed in a release of Firefox a year or so down the line.

Comment 3

[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.