Rob Ballou

IE8 Web Slices

IE8 has begun supporting a new feature called ‘Web Slices’, which are more akin to RSS feeds than microformats (although they get lumped into the same category here and there). Firstly, the web slices are a DIV with a specific class name (hslice) that will then cause IE8 to do a couple different things (this is my interpretation here):

1. Alert the user via a button like the RSS feed button
2. Place an icon or control (I’m not sure at the time of this writing how this works) near the web slice.

Users can use these controls to subscribe to the content in the hslice, just like an RSS feed. What is in the DIV apparently can be marked up like a microformat (thus the confusion) using hatom attributes as well as some functionality directly from RSS. The content, though, seems like it can be pretty much anything.

One issue I see with this is that web slices are not microformats: it does not solve a specific, real world semantic problem and it does not create any more semantic value than just leaving content as tag soup on a page. Like others, I think it is at least odd that the IE team did not just use hatom directly. There are some reasonable assertions about why this is the case, but the two specifications are fairly similar and I think that Microsoft could use the hatom spec instead of creating their own product or work with the microformat community. But Microsoft does have a track record creating their own technology rather than use open standards. (Aside: I find it amusing that despite IE8’s claimed better support for web standards, the web slice page has over 100 validation issues at the time of this writing).

That said, I don’t think Microsoft is interested in creating or suggesting to developers to create semantic content. The specification deals in terms of what is needed to accomplish a useful feature in their browser: every attribute that can be created for a web slice deals with how the slice behaves and how it updates in their browser. Being that (currently at least) this is a browser feature, I’m not sure what the adoption will be like and I’m curious if Firefox and WebKit will follow suit (I also wonder if developers will integrate web slice aggregation into existing or new web applications).

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