Archive for the ‘web’ tag
URL Shortners
Got two news on this topic today:
- bit.ly starts offering premium services.
- Google launched a URL shortening service.
OpenSearch search providers and browsers
All the major browser vendors support the OpenSearch format (yes, this means including Microsoft IE8) for registering a search provider in your browser.
Writing a OpenSearch provider
Recently I wrote a search provider for my favorite book-buying site, Pustak.co.in:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<ShortName>Pustak.co.in</ShortName>
<Description>Pustak.co.in provider</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Url type="text/html"
template="http://pustak.co.in/pustak/books/search?q={searchTerms}&type=book&page=1"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>
Hosting your search provider
To let people use your search provider, you need to host it in the web. For our example, let us assume that you host it here: http://yourhost/your_opensearch.xml.
The MIME type of this document can be left to its default application/xml, or can be made OpenSearch specific: application/opensearchdescription+xml.
Using JavaScript to register a provider
After deploying the OpenSearch XML in your host, we need to write a JavaScript function to register the provider with your browser:
<script type="text/javascript">
function registerYourSearchProvider(){
window.external.AddSearchProvider("http://yourhost/your_opensearch.xml");
}
</script>
This JavaScript worked with Firefox, IE8 and Google Chrome. Opera 10 was not able to understand it.
Auto-discovering OpenSearch providers
Recently when I saw my Google Chrome search providers, I saw this list:
I was surprised to see this list because there are providers that I have not added specifically. How was Google Chrome “discovering” these providers?
A look into the HTML source of one of the auto-registering search provider, I found the following info (in the <head> section):
<link rel="search"
href="/mavensearch.xml"
type="application/opensearchdescription+xml"
title="mavensearch.net" />
To let browsers auto-discover you as a search-provider, add the above in your sites!
Most despicable web browser: IE
I know I am not the first person to say this. I know I am neither the last. But I am using this post to ease my indignation about a pathetic piece of engineering called IE.
Recently I have been working on portlet development in Liferay. We developed a fancy portlet with Ajax and stuff showing content from a Alfresco deployment. While styling the portlet, I experienced nightmare. The HTML, CSS and JavaScript we developed worked in all browsers, except IE 7. And the reasons for not working are so pathetic: nested divs, nested styling components, menu generation using lists.
I am wondering what kind of coding and engineering effort would have gone into making this crap of a browser called IE. As I am imagining how to write code for parsing and rendering CSS display components, I can feel the awkward code that is inside IE parsing my CSS. Something like graceful degradation and granularity of CSS styles are simple to achieve by “a little thought” while coding. But the crap inside IE makes it so complicated!
I wish there never was a browser called IE.
indiWiz.com is Subhash's look on technology. Needless to say, it is highly biased with eccentric opinions. 