Microsummaries feature of Firefox 2 which is at alpha 3

Firefox 2 will have a new feature in it called Microsummaries.

Firefox 2.0 recently issued an alpha 3 release. [Note the Microsummaries feature was already in it before this release. They are asking their alpha testers for continued help in testing this feature.]

The fact that Microsummaries are already implemented, and the nature of the feature - straight forward XML syntax, incorporating the already-implemented standards-based XSLT stylesheet mechanism - gives me a whale of a lot of confidence that this feature will not be cut before Firefox 2 ships.

Microsummaries in Firefox will almost certainly cause a spike in demand for and interest in XSLT stylesheet development.

One application will be to read all the documents that have been annotated with Microformats.

The Microformats will call attention to things like addresses, dates, product/service reviews (e.g. for movies, books, websites, etc.). For example, they will clue in the Technorati weblog social blog tagging/indexing/searching service that they are there.



Then, Firefox 2 Microsummaries can make those very things stand out on a page. In fact, they can cull them from a number of pages, winnow out the other content/verbage, and just present the information from the Microformats.



Along the way, they can sort the information, count it, and even sum up numbers in it. Pretty heady stuff.

People who have written XSLT pages already know something about them that most other people do not. XSLT can be used for a lot of things that have nothing to do with styling a web page.

They are a powerful tool for processing information that is in XML format. Thanks to Microsummaries, they will have more information on which to do their thing.

Web surfers will spend less time searching for information and have more time & ways to use the information.

The closest thing to Microsummaries in web browsers right now, is the optional Grease Monkey extension for Firefox 1.0 or 1.5. It sounds pretty neat but it works with Javascript. I do not think it works with XSLT.

Personally, I would rather write a simple stylesheet and wrap it in a Microsummary, than install a Grease Monkey script from the Grease Monkey script repository (Userscripts.org).

I think writing the XSLT to put in a new Microsummary would go faster than checking the leneage and pedigree of the Javascript. At least in some cases, it would. Time will tell.

I really am extremely XSLT

I taught myself XSLT back in 2001, when I stumbled over the open source Apache Cocoon software.

Cocoon used XSLT all over the place. The way it generated HTML web pages out of handy little XML data files was amazing.


I used it for some kind of project status reports or something like that back in 2001. Not much. I think that was about it.

I continued to study it and read quite a bit about it, grocking more and more about how it could be used and what it would be good at doing.

In 2002, I was fortunate enough to land a reports generating project.

Without going into details, it was pretty awesome.


The technique I came up with pulled Java business objects off a server, transmogrified them into XML, used XSLT I wrote for each report to format them into an XML based report format I invented, and then ran the output of that first XSLT transformation through reusable XSLT transformation I wrote for each file format.

So, in simple terms, the level of software reuse I got was amazing.

  (1 object-to-XML converter in Java) +

    (1 XSLT script per report) +

    (1 XSLT script per output file format)

Notice that is a plus sign - not a multiplication symbol - between the two XSLT terms. This is not an m * n cost. This is an m + n cost.

In effect, I created a way to do reporting deeds - and they're done dirt cheap, to cop a phrase from Dire Straits.


There were 3 file formats directly supported: HTML (styled with XSLT), XSL-FO, and GMR (Gnu Gnumeric spreadsheet). Free, open source software was used to transform those documents into other file formats - such as XLS (Microsoft Excel spreadsheets), PDF (Adobe Acrobat reports), and so on.


That project really drove home to me the excellence of XSLT and just how far you could go with so little effort, using XML for mundane IT work. And if anything is mundane IT work, it is generating business reports.

Another thing I was pleased about was the software costs of the project: $0. That is right, not one dollar was spent on purchasing software for this project. All the libraries, all the tools, all the frameworks, all the servers used were free.


Looking around and talking to other people since, many organizations will pay tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a workable report-generation scheme for Java - and they still have programming costs with each report they generate!.

I thought that was silly. Still do.

Some projects with odd reporting requirements will need special software. If they hunt around, I know they will find free tools they can use to slash their costs with little effort.


I have been a colossal XSLT fan ever since that reporting project. I sort of was before. Afterwards though, I had a huge excuse.