[pmwiki-users] Request: Add default OpenSearch & Universal Edit Button support to PmWiki

Eemeli Aro eemeli at gmail.com
Tue Mar 10 10:59:51 CDT 2009


OpenSearch is a way to syndicate and aggregate search results. Its
most prominent parts are the possibility for autodiscovery (in
Firefox, the dropdown arrow in the search box glows blue to indicate
that the site may be added to the search bar) and the standardised
autosuggestion format (eg. as seen when searching Google using the
Firefox search box).
  -> http://www.opensearch.org/Home

Universal Edit Button is a specially formatted <link> in a page's
<head> to edit the current page. So far, it's only made visible by a
Firefox extension but is quite widely available, eg. enabled by
default at least in MediaWiki and TWiki.
  -> http://universaleditbutton.org/Universal_Edit_Button

Cookbook recipes already exist to enable these (
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/OpenSearch and
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/UniversalEditButton ), but
shouldn't these rather be in the core? Both of these are rather
non-intrusive, adding a single <link> to the page header, but still
enable decent functionality where available. Admittedly OpenSearch
does require a little more work to generate the description document
and the autosuggestion results, but these are only activated on
request.

My reason to suggest the inclusion of these in the core is the
combination of their relative obscurity and unintrusiveness, along
with the network effect that comes from using them. I also don't see
any downside to including these in the core. If the user's end client
doesn't support the technologies they're silently ignored, and if they
are supported, they are presented very discreetly as part of the
browser chrome.

For full disclosure, I ought to mention that I wrote the OpenSearch
recipe and added an alternative implementation to UniversalEditButton.
I also added a PITS entry for this
(http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/01080) but figured it'd get rather
lost among the plethora of other open issues.

eemeli



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