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Internet Explorer 8's Webslices Feature: Widgetizing Pieces of Web Pages?

Posted At : March 5, 2008 3:41 PM | Posted By : Brian
Related Categories: Miscellaneous, Web development
The first public beta of Internet Explorer 8 was released today. In addition to supposedly being fully web standards-compliant, IE 8 comes with two new...well, capabilites: Activities and Webslices.

Curious (and admittedly a bit bored with what I was currently doing), I did a Google search and came up with a page that does a pretty good job of explaining Activities and Webslices:

IE8 Beta Is Out And With It Some Slices & Activities

The Activities capability allows web developers to provide XML code that will add contextual menu options to certain page content when you right-click on that content, allowing you to send that content to another web page or service, like sending an address on the page to a mapping service like Google Maps.

The Webslices capability is even more interesting (if I understand it correctly): using CSS, web developers can tag a piece of the web page as being a slice. End-users can then save this slice in IE, and IE will periodically check that slice for any changes. If the content is changed, the end-user is notified and they can pull up just that part of that web page as a pop-up widget in the browser.

I don't quite know what to make of it...it's like they've made it possible to send a request to a webservice from the page (Activities) and to make part of the page a webservice (Webslices).

It's an interesting idea, but what will the other browsers do with this stuff?

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How are the Slices different from Safari 3.0's Web Clips?
# Posted By Fred | 3/5/08 4:51 PM
Based on what I just read about Web Clips (sorry, not a Mac user), the two biggest differences are with Webslices that the web page developer decides what section of the page can be a slice, and the pop-up window that displays the slice is still a part of IE, while with Web Clips the end-user can select any part of the web page arbitrarily, and the clip lives in a widget that can be put anywhere on the desktop.
# Posted By Brian Swartzfager | 3/5/08 7:27 PM
The biggest Microsoft's problem i think is their culture. They grew up selling products but now in a free internet world must change that.
http://www.btscene.com
# Posted By juniorj | 11/25/09 4:20 AM
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