Mozilla and microformats

You may remember me writing about GreaseDoggy, a Greasemonkey script that the Cosmo team put together a few weeks back for detecting events in web pages and adding them to Cosmo calendars. At the time I remembered seeing a Firefox extension for microformat detection, but I couldn't remember its name, and I didn't bother to search hard for it. Well, that extension was Operator, and these blog posts re-introduced it to me.

Operator adds a toolbar with menus for each type of microformatted data it finds in a web page - addresses, contacts, events, locations, "tagspaces", bookmarks, and "resources" (I'm not yet sure what those are). For each item, you can choose from a list of handlers to take an action on that data.

For example, when viewing The Bad Plus at Villa Montalvo, you can:

• map Villa Montalvo with Google or Yahoo! by either street address or geographic coordinates
  
• download a vCard for Villa Montalvo (on OS X, this launches Address Book and prompts me to add an entry)
• add Villa Montalvo as a Yahoo! contact
• download the event as iCalendar (on OS X, this launches iCal and asks me to choose a calendar to add the event to)
• add the event to 30 Boxes, Google or Yahoo! calendars
• download a KML file (which presumably would open Google Earth if I had it installed)
• search del.icio.us, flickr, Ma.gnolia, Technorati, Upcoming, Yedda, and YouTube for things tagged "blues", "jazz", or "music"

It appears that you can define your own actions and associate them with microformats. Presumably this would allow us to extract the part of GreaseDoggy that talks to Cosmo and use Operator to add events, tasks and notes to the server. And, as we come up with ways to map other microformats to the Cosmo model, we would just have add a little bit of glue to our custom Operator script to support those formats as well.

Pretty exciting stuff! I'll try to bribe our team to make this happen.