Firefox 3: The Semantic Web Browser? - Page 2

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While Microsoft may be tight-lipped about its approach to Semantic Web browsing, neither its browser nor Mozilla's necessarily need to integrate microformats to actually begin using a component of the Semantic Web.

That's because the Semantic Web, in some senses, is already used by millions today through a format most browser users recognize: RSS feeds. The RDF standard at the heart of the Semantic Web is also critical to RSS feeds, which represents the most common usage of RDF on the Web at the moment.

"Over the last few years, the types of content that people have syndicated through RSS feeds have expanded to include audio and video, creating a renaissance of independent broadcasting on the Web," Faaborg said.

RDF plays a special role with Firefox 3, enabling it to better interpret the content type of RSS feeds. Faaborg said that previously, Web browsers haven't played much of a role in the podcasting movement.

"Firefox 3's support for Web feeds is now a lot smarter: Firefox 3 can now detect the difference between Web feeds containing mostly text, audio podcasts and video podcasts, and it makes it easy for users to dispatch these different types of feeds to the appropriate application," Faaborg said.

"For instance, you can have Firefox always send feeds containing mostly text to your favorite feed reader, audio podcasts to an application like iTunes or Songbird, and video podcasts to an application like Miro," he said.

While some might argue that the Semantic Web might not necessarily be a positive thing, Faaborg isn't among them. In his view, what matters are the ways in which user's lives will be made easier in the future thanks to different types of Semantic Web technologies.

"For instance, imagine a future version of Firefox that keeps a history of not just the different Web pages you visit, but also the data it recognized on those pages, like events and locations," he said. "This will make it a lot easier for users to quickly retrieve an important piece of information they have seen in the past."

Faaborg said a number of different potential uses for semantic information could impact users' overall Web experience. For example, events mentioned in blogs to which a user is subscribed could potentially be added as a layer in the user's calendar.

Another potential application for semantic information is that the functionality of the location bar in Firefox 3 could be expanded with microformat detection, he said.

Imagine a user wishing to find the location of a restaurant for which they just booked a reservation online. Instead of simply browsing through their Web history to find an address on an earlier Web page -- and then doing a copy-and-paste operation to locate in on an online map -- the user could just quickly begin typing the name of the restaurant into their browser's location bar, and then select the correct result to navigate to a map of its location.

Months later, if the user wants to recommend the restaurant to a friend but can't remember its name, all they would need to do is type a small part of its physical address into their browser's location bar to retrieve the name.

"This type of streamlined information retrieval will be possible if your browser locally stores more than just a list of URLs you visit, but also the structured semantic data that it encounters while you browser the Web," Faaborg said.