But if your blog or a client has a loyal readership, it would be convenient if they could just use their browser’s searchbar as a shortcut. For example currently we work on a website relaunch for a big German city, and it’s easily conceivable that citizens want to search this site more often.

Here comes a side effect of OpenSearch: the OpenSearch descriptions are machine readable XML files. Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 are two of those “machines” if you let them know the file exists:

1. <link rel="search" type="application/ opensearchdescription+xml" title="Your website’s title" href="/opensearch.xml" />

Of course that belongs in the head. Now all you need are a few more lines of code in the opensearch.xml file:

1. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
2. <OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/ opensearch/1.1/">
3. <ShortName>Your website’s title</ShortName>
4. <Description>A short description of the search</Description>
5. <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
6. <Image height="16" width="16" type="image/x-icon"> http://yourdomain.com/favicon.ico</Image>
7. <Url type="text/html" template="http://yourdomain.com/ search/ ?q={searchTerms}"/>
8. </OpenSearchDescription>

Just change the shortname property, the favorite icon path, the search URI and parameters. Don’t change {searchTerms}. And that’s all, it’s a five minute no-brainer…

Further Reading

• OpenSearch documentation (Mozilla Developer Center)
• JSON type-ahead suggestion functionality for OpenSearch

Update: Internet Explorer 8 now supports type ahead suggestions, too.

A little known W3C standard is the Platform of Internet Content Selection (PICS). You can tell from the poor layout that it’s a very old standard — in fact all of its parts are from 1996 and 1997. OMG, that’s ancient! That’s even older than HTML 4, CSS, or the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines!

PICS is a system for self-labeling. That raised some concerns about censorship in 1998, but governments who really want to censor their population’s internet access have found more effective ways to block content (I, for one, can recommend Tor as a countermeasure, also available as a Firefox extension, though I cannot guarantee your government approves it). So what remains is a meta element with information about your website, accompanied by a machine readable RDF/XML file.

1. <link rel="meta" href="/pics-label.rdf" type="application/rdf+xml" title="ICRA PICS label" />
2. <meta http-equiv="pics-label" content='(pics-1.1 "http://www.icra.org/pics/vocabularyv03/" l gen true for "http://learningtheworld.eu" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 1 oa 0 ob 0 oc 0 od 0 oe 0 of 0 og 0 oh 0 c 1))' />

Since in the nineties internet progress was driven by porn, PICS is mostly about child protection, although it can be used to describe a machine readable privacy statement and other things as well. Think of an early predecessor of the Semantic Web. Or in microformats it would be hPorn. Well, I assume very few of you run xxx sites, so why am I wasting your time with this post?

Because the PICS standard is most convenient when your website is not pornographic. The standard provides a way to label your website and distinguish between pictures of naked people as Greek ancient sculptures, in an educational or journalistic context, or as mere porn. But despite the name it’s not only suitable for rating pictures, it’s for text content or user-generated content as well, among other criteria. Plus the PICS label is recognized by Google, so it’s not about rushing ahead and self-censoring to please our overlords, it’s a measure to maximize the target audience and avoid mislead traffic. I believe a few of your clients may appreciate that. For example although this post uses quite a few trigger words, PICS provides a way to tell search engines and cybersitting software about the true nature of this article. I love that ability!

Also ARIA became a bit of a buzz since only three days before Microsoft announced support for it in Internet Explorer 8. So there is partial support in Firefox 1.5, more in Firefox 2.0, and full support including liveregions for dynamically updated content in Firefox 3.0. Also Opera 9.5 has it. It can be used today as it doesn’t break old browsers, they will simply ignore the new attributes. Don’t hesitate, you can do good with it right now.

In the meantime Aaron Leventhal and his fellows were busy negotiating with members of the HTML5 working group to find a way of implementation without namespacing. So as of Firefox 3.0 it will be <img role="checkbox" aria-checked="false" /> instead of the previous namespaced notation aaa:checked="false".

Microsoft also thought about addressing the new attributes in the DOM, alas they did it the old proprietary way instead of sitting at a virtual or real table with the other browser vendors and thinking of a common way to do this. Opera’s Anne van Kesteren and the participants at the Browser Wars panel at SXSW were picking heavily on that subject. I believe the IE team got the message, but for the moment I would suggest to ignore the non-standard DOM attributes.

Thanks again to Gez, Becky, Lisa, and Shawn for their input and help. You made this a first-class experience!

Further reading

• W3C WAI-ARIA Overview
• Mozilla Developer Center ARIA FAQ
• A List Apart: Accessible Web 2.0 Applications with WAI-ARIA

A couple of days ago the German version of the Web Accessibility Toolbar 2.0 for Internet Explorer was released. It was developed by Steve Faulkner and translated by Benjamin Grießmann from Web for All with contributions from your humble host. Which reminds me that I also translated Gez Lemon’s new and improved Colour Contrast Analyser for Firefox earlier this year.