Introduction to Internet Explorer 8 Activities and WebSlices
During the first keynote at Mix 08 the Internet Explorer team officially rolled out the first public viewing of Internet Explorer 8. There are some really nice things that will be offered in IE 8, like CSS 2.1 comparability, ACID2, etc. But what I found to be very intriguing are Activies and Web Slices. I think these two features can be leveraged immediately and without much effort to give a business a real advantage.
Internet Explorer Activities
Internet Explorer Activities are a way to offer your service or content as a dynamic part of any web page. The classic example is making it easy for a user to highlight an address and see it on a small pop-up map on demand.
The implementation of this feature involves creating a small custom XML file in the OpenService protocol. Users have to actually subscribe to the activities on your site. This can easily be done with a custom button and a little JavaScript.
<button onclick="window.external.addService('http://foo.com/map.xml')">Add Map Activity</button>
Internet Explorer WebSlices
WebSlices give web users the ability to grab a portion of a web page they want to monitor. When a used grabs a slice of a page there will be a shortcut placed in the Favorites bar of Internet Explorer. This can be a very exciting opportunity for E-Commerce sites to allow customers to monitor products for price and description changes. I can also see it as a way that marketers could conceivable use them as a promotional tool to promote other products and sales directly to interested customers. Think about using this instead of getting an inbox full of junk fliers!
Creating a WebSlice is a very simple process because it uses a combination of hAtom and the WebSlice format to markup the slice. hAtom is a microformat lets you specify a class to designate a sort of Meta Tag information about content on a page. Internet Explorer 8 interprets this code and will visually indicate to the user they can subscribe to the Web Slice.
The Web Slice format is pretty nicely defined to give developers the ability granularly specify settings around the slice. There is also a white paper available on WebSlices.
New Web Sites
During the keynote the power of these two features hit me quickly and I decided to create a couple of sites around these features. IE8Activities.com will focus on information around Internet Explorer 8 Activities and IE8Slices.com will do the same for WebSlices. I am not totally sure where these two sites will go or what they will ultimately contain. But I wanted to get them up there as soon as I could to provide a resource to promote these great new features.
I also recommend reading Jane Kim's introduction to Activities and Slices as well as watching her Mix 08 presentation on the features.