Adding a search provider for searching Gmail from the browser

Adding search engines to the browser (in the top-right search field in most browsers) may be done by creating an xml file containing an Opensearch description and then adding them with a javascript method call.

The below button adds a search provider for searching gmail:



The javascript call is

window.external.AddSearchProvider('http://fornwall.net/files/blog/gmail-search-provider.xml');

where the xml file is as follows:

<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
                       xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
  <ShortName>Gmail</ShortName>
  <Description>Search Gmail</Description>
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
  <Image width="16" height="16">https://mail.google.com/favicon.ico</Image>
  <Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="https://mail.google.com/mail/#search/{searchTerms}"/>
  <moz:SearchForm>https://mail.google.com/mail/</moz:SearchForm>
</OpenSearchDescription>

"Universal Edit Button" for marking web pages as editable

There exists an intresting suggestion for a Universal Edit Button on web pages. Basically, just as the RSS icon pops up in the browser address bar when visiting a page with a feed related to it, an edit icon shows up when visiting an editable page.

Marking the page as editable is done by adding a <link/> element with content as follows:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/wiki" title="Edit this page!" href="wiki?edit=WelcomeVisitors"/>

The values of the rel and type attributes are currently a bit strange and are being discussed.

Apparently, Wikipedia has already adopted it and there is a Firefox extension available to watch it live.