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Re: Getting websites to talk to dashboard

On Mon, 2003-07-21 at 18:02, Jackson Harper wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 	It would be nice if we could come up with a way to get websites to
> communicate with dashboard. I would like my 'dashboard enabled' site
> to tell dashboard to display some extra info or search for a certain
> clue-packet. ie I go to www.ximian.com and a list of ximian products
> shows up in dashboard. Any ideas on how this could be done?

I'm shortly going to be doing some hacking related to this, that builds
on the clues that Epiphany sends to Dashboard.

Auto-discovery of RSS files is managed by having 

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS"
href="http://rdfweb.org/mt/foaflog/index.rdf"; />

in the <head></head> section of your HTML.  I'm gonna write a backend
that chains the RSS clue into Dashboard, so the relevant RSS feed
appears while you're browsing the site.  I also intend to do something
similar for FOAF (see http://rdfweb.org/) files so details of the page's
author could be displayed and chained.

It may be that these two, RSS and FOAF, meet your needs for extra info. 
As for searching for extra info:

To extend this to a more general mechanism, you might do:

<link rel="meta" type="application/x-dashboardhints+xml" 
      title="Dashboard" href="... dashboard-hints.xml" />

and then invent an XML format for the extra queries you want and store
it in the target of the href.  Then write a Dashboard backend to perform
said queries.  Perhaps the best and easiest backend to write would
simply be one that generated extra clues in the chain from that XML
file.  In this setting, the cost of installing backends is high: you
want to keep things as general as possible.

-- Edd
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