book page 6 - Dave's Blog

Outline View Internet Explorer Extension

I've made another extension for IE8, Outline View, which gives you a side bar in IE that displays an outline of the current page and lets you make intrapage bookmarks.

The outline is generated based on the heading tags in the document (e.g. h1, h2, etc), kind of like what W3C's Semantic data extractor tool displays for an outline. So if the page doesn't use heading tags the way the HTML spec intended or just sticks img tags in them, then the outline doesn't look so hot. On a page that does use headings as intended though it looks really good. For instance a section from the HTML 4 spec shows up quite nicely and I find its actually useful to be able to jump around to the different sections. Actually, I've been surprised going to various blogs how well the outline view is actually working -- I thought a lot more webdevs would be abusing their heading tags.

I've also added intrapage bookmarks. When you make a text selection and clear it, that selected text is added as a temporary intrapage bookmark which shows up in the correct place in the outline. You can navigate to the bookmark or right click to make it permanent. Right now I'm storing the permanent intrapage bookmarks in IE8's new per-domain DOM storage because I wanted to avoid writing code to synchronize a cross process store of bookmarks, it allowed me to play with the DOM storage a bit, and the bookmarks will get cleared appropriately when the user clears their history via the control panel.

Text/Plain Fragment Bookmarklet

The text/plain fragment documented in RFC 5147 and described on Erik Wilde's blog struck my interest and, like the XML fragment, I wanted to see if I could implement this in IE. In this case there's no XSLT for me to edit so, like my plain/text word wrap bookmarklet I've implemented it as a bookmarklet. This is only a partial implementation as it doesn't implement the integrity checks.

Check out my text/plain fragment bookmarklet.

XSLT Meddler Script

I've made an XSLT Meddler script in my continued XSLT adventures. Meddler is a simple and easy web server that runs whatever JScript.NET code you give it. I wrote a script that takes an indicated XSLT on the server, downloads an indicated XML from the Internet and returns the result of running that XML through the XSLT. This is useful when you want to work with something like the Zune software or IE7's feed platform which only reads feeds over the HTTP protocol. I'll give more interesting and specific examples of how this could be useful in the future.

Word Wrapping IE's Plain Text

If you view a plain text document in Internet Explorer 8, for instance the plain text version of Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother and press F12 to bring up the developer toolbar, you can see that IE simply takes the plain text, sticks it inside a

 tag, and renders it.  This means that word wrapping isn't supplied and the only line breaks that appear are those in the document.  However, since the text document is converted to HTML it means I can implement word wrap myself using a bookmarklet:
javascript:function ww() { var preTag = document.getElementsByTagName('pre')[0]; preTag.style.fontFamily="arial"; preTag.style.wordWrap='break-word'; }; ww();
After adding a favorite and setting the favorite's URL to the previous, I can view plain text documents, and select my Word Wrap favorite to apply word wrap and non-fixed width font.

Investigation of a Few Application Protocols (Updated)

Windows allows for application protocols in which, through the registry, you specify a URL scheme and a command line to have that URL passed to your application. Its an easy way to hook a webbrowser up to your application. Anyone can read the doc above and then walk through the registry and pick out the application protocols but just from that info you can't tell what the application expects these URLs to look like. I did a bit of research on some of the application protocols I've seen which is listed below. Good places to look for information on URI schemes: Wikipedia URI scheme, and ESW Wiki UriSchemes.

Facebook Profile Views Application - Failed Idea

I had an idea for a Facebook app the other day. I wondered who actually looked at my profile and thought I could create a Facebook app that would record this information and display it. When I talked to Vishu though he said that this wasn't something that Facebook would be too happy with. Indeed the Platform Policy explicitly disallows this in section 2.8. This explained why the app didn't already exist. Its probably for the best since everyone assumes they can anonymously view Facebook profiles and would be irritated if that weren't the case.

On the topic of assumed anonymity, check out this article on the aggregation and selling off of your cell phone data including your physical location.

Kids in the Hall Live in Seattle

Sarah and I saw the Kids in the Hall "Live As We'll Ever Be" Tour in the WaMu theater in Seattle this past Thursday. I'd only ever seen their television show so it was cool to see them live. I thought that them being in a live format on stage would make the show significantly different, but other than having a bad seat and not being able to see very well, and the Kids sometimes ad-libbing or breaking character, it was like watching their show. It consisted of mostly new material with some returning characters like the Chicken Lady, Buddy Cole, the head crusher, etc. Their Facebook page has two videos that they played during the show.

I've been using the best Kids in the Hall fansite with an archive of searchable transcripts since high school. But now days what with all the new fangled video websites I can link right to some of my favorite sketches from the show. Like the Inexperienced Cannibal.

And the meta-sketch The Raise.