Webslices - Friendlier Syndication Than RSS

3:30p.m., Thu 13 Mar 2008

For me “Webslices” are the most interesting feature in the IE8 beta (which, I must confess, I haven;t installed, I've merely read the documentation and reactions from those that have played with it).

Webslices are a portion of an HTML document that users can view in a preview window in the similar way that RSS Livemarks are in viewed in Firefox, but with HTML formatting – images, styles, js ....etc...

There's a screengrab of a webslice in action on the IE8 blog.

And some documentation:

• Webslices White Paper
• Subscribing to Content with WebSlice (notes on MSDN)
• MSDN WebSlice Format Spec

Crucially, publishers control what content can be websliced by using a really simple microformat. It's not an 'official' microformat, but then microformats are hardly 'official'.

Since the webslice is only a portion of an HTML doc that may well mess up the CSS styling. The documentation mentions:

"The outer HTML extracted from the entry-content element is used for display in the details view. The styles associated with the HTML of the entry-content element and the original webpage are used: - imported stylesheets - style rules defined in head element - direct in-line styles"

The lack of the cascade may cause some styling issues. But then, you may be able to use that to your advantage, meaning that the webslices appear slightly differently as a slice as they do in the pages of a site.

From a user point of view it's a richer way to view content as opposed to RSS, and more flexible since there's muhc more context than text only RSS can provide.

From a publisher's point of view it means you can syndicate more complex types of information and without having to manage a alternate context for info - RSS is currently a different file on a different URL in a different format.

Of course, this being Microsoft, you can't be entirely sure that the execution will be as good as the concept. But the concept is sound. And it can't be long beofre we get a firefox add-on that 'does' webslices. Daniel Glazman's already cracking on with one, and I'm sure there'll be others.