I haven’t read through the other comments, but I’d just like a simple option to find content contained within the given microformatted div/span (by specifying the type). E.g., if “address” were the class, be able to search for “Oak St” only within divs or spans that had the address class within them. It’d be even cooler if one could search all open documents or specified files (kind of like a simpler version of how I’d love to see XQuery searching become part of standard Firefox as well as accessible from JS/to extension developers).

thx,
Brett

Thanks for the comments. I could certainly look at making the toolbar items disappear instead of disable.

As far as your other comments:

1. I REALLY want drag and drop reordering to be there but I have been unable to do it well in the constraints of Firefox.

2. Editing descriptive names is interesting. I’ll think about that.

3. My goal is for MF definitions and handlers to be installable/upgradeable from the client. As a matter of fact, this will be somewhat available in the next Operator.

If I can give my further 2 cents feedback on the Operator GUI:
- users should be able to customize the order and behaviour of each element, it would be great to have right-click contextual menus and drag & drop functionality for this;
- descriptive names should be editable (much as one can rename toolbar bookmarks).
- it would be really cool if MF definitions and handlers were installable/upgradable directly from the client (like Firefox Add-ons or Greasemonkey scripts), without the need of downloading and importing external files.

End of my wishlist, keep up the good work

After thinking a little bit about Alex Faaborgs mockups, reading the comments here, and musing about my own usage of firefox, I would like to give this feedback:

The most important thing for the microformats UI (for me) is to find a good middleway between the following two extremes:

1.) using firefox as a viewer for all microformats and every detail of them
2.) using firefox only as a middle man to call a different application (or webservice) with the microformat data

Both extremes can be easily demonstrated by todays RSS icon:
some people love to read RSS feeds in their browser, while other people just want the browser to pass the feed URL to their feedreader of choice.

The important thing to consider here, is that microformats might be found, for which more then one type of operation is possible:
If I found an adress, I could want to view it in my mapping application to get a route to it, or I might want to put it into my address book.

Under these considerations, I think the following could work:

a.) put an indicator in the status bar, either a general microformats icon, or one of the three icons suggested by Alex Faaborg.

b.) put an icon next to the place in the document, where the microformat information is contained. If the user browses a document with a lot of mf data, he will be most interested in the data related to the current reading position.

c.) Now, if any of these icons is clicked, then a sidebar is opened, which shows all microformat data detected on the page (like on one of Alex Faaborgs mockups), and highlights the data from the clicked on place, if this was the way the user entered the sidebar.

d.) after the user had a chance to view the human readable version of the data, he can click on it again and be presented with a choice of which programm to use to process the data. this can also work if more then one data item is selected

just my two cents, I am no UI expert, but a long time firefox user and semantic web researcher