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Such an extension would have value if it were open source and usable with any storage backend, not just Google's - Gerv
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| valign="top" | rich content microsummaries
| valign="top" | [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341347 bug 341347]<br>[http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2006/12/06/tufte-and-graphical-microsummaries/ Tufte and Graphical Live Titles]<br>[http://wiki.mozilla.org/GraphicalMicrosummaries Graphical Microsummaries]
| valign="top" | MykMelez
| valign="top" | MykMelez
| valign="top" | As Tufte notes, it can be very useful to pack a lot of information in a small space. Microsummaries are targeted at that kind of information presentation. But microsummaries can only display characters at the moment, which severely limits how much information they can display and how well they can display it.
In fact, the most dramatically informative microsummaries (like a graph of the day's activity for a stock, or a graphical depiction of the next five day's weather) are currently impossible to implement. But if sites could provide rich content (i.e. HTML or image) microsummaries, then these would be possible.
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| valign="top" | microsummary builder
| valign="top" | [https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3741/ Microsummary Generator Builder extension]
| valign="top" | MykMelez
| valign="top" | MykMelez
| valign="top" | For sites that don't provide microsummaries, it's useful to be able to extract your own. But building one from scratch requires knowledge of XSLT, XPath, and other technologies that even computer-savvy users and software engineers may lack. And even for folks who do have that knowledge, it's much harder than it should be to extract a microsummary from a web page.
Tools could significant improve this situation, and [https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3741/ one such tool] is already available, but there's still a lot more that can be done in two directions: for regular users, we could have a tool that made extracting a microsummary super-simple. In fact, it could start as simple as clicking an element on a web page and dragging it to the bookmarks toolbar. We could then build on that basic functionality with additional simple mechanisms for massaging the information to be summarized.
For developers, we could have a tool that couples those simple mechanisms for average users with more sophisticated functions for inspecting and manipulating the microsummary generator. For example, we might provide an editable "source" view of the generator. And we might enable more complicated UI gestures for things like anchoring an XPath that retrieves some informatino to a non-root node (f.e. to the node that labels that information, whose relationship to the information is less likely to change over time than the relationship of that information node to the root node).
