MS Slices X-Path to Ribbons

Zack — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 04:31:32 +0000

Microsoft has a history of creating things that are one-off mainstream, (or Open Source), in what they call an effort of efficiency or a claim to sticking to standards. In reality, they’ve just muddied the waters for developers looking to make the web more ubiquitous.

IE8 continues this misguided charge with Web Slices, a particular element of a page which the browser can selectively update asynchronous to the rest of your behavior. In lamens terms, consider it to be RSS on crack. The idea is kind of cool and interesting as a developer: Provide desktop and web apps a URI to a manageable piece of information that can be parsed relatively frequently for updates.

My issue is two fold: (1) the URI Microsoft defines is nonstandard and trivial; and (2), why should we learn another set of proprietary syntax for what should be defined elsewhere in the page or headers?

As for the URI, XPath is a much stronger and cleaner way to identify what is subscribable. Why should I be limited to just one element at a time? XPath would allot me several subscriptions all at once. A URI like http://blog.adventdigerati.com//*[@class="story"]:first would give you my the snippet to my latest blog post, and omitting :first would give you all the posts on the front page. Why is that so hard?

Secondly, most of Slices’ API is defined using bastardized (X)HTML elements and attributes. Even I learned that text content should not be used to define semantic meaning in a document; it’s a corruption of XML standard, one of the best directions in web standardization so far. How hard would it be to include a custom tag in the ? Namespacing a custom tag would be sufficient, and you could even achieve the same effects MS wants via these methods. would give a consistent way to retrieve the titles for each slice with one line of code! Or, if need be that the slices be drastically different, would parse slower but achieve the same goals, and be standards-compliant.

In all, everything Microsoft wanted to get out of their new Web Slices feature could already be done using existing tools; let’s not clutter what could be an awesome new tool for developers with sub-par requisites that somehow shoehorn their way into standards by just being left to fester.

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MS Slices X-Path to Ribbons