Puzzlepieces – tag ‘googletoolbar’

In my last post was my initital reaction to this new API from Google. It’s not surprising that I’m worried about Google’s plans here, as their record on XML cooperation hasn’t been all that stellar. I haven’t fully looked into it yet, but I had noticed Google’s absence from a new standardization effort; Retailers, Engines Want Standard for Product Description (via Gary) lists MSN, Yahoo!, and others.

Anyhow, getting down to the real point, I’ve decided to completely skip over “What Google Should Have Done,” and go right ahead to “What Google Should Now Do.” Save myself the wasted keystrokes.

Step 1: Fix Feed Refresh Interval

Remove the refresh-interval attribute from <feed>. Add it to RSS/Atom in a namespace. This shouldn’t really change anything. This has nothing to do with OpenSearch by the way, it’s just my general opinion on XML - extend an existing format rather than creating a new one.

After I started writing this, DeWitt posted his take on it all: Google Toolbar, Custom Buttons, and OpenSearch. It includes a lot of what I was going to say, so I will continue my comments as a reply to his post.

A final note, for anyone that’s counting… this makes at least four different Google products that are RSS/Atom readers (Google Reader, Google Toolbar, Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop). I hope they’re all using the API that the Google Reader team has been developing.

Google Toolbar API - Guide to Making Custom Button - aaaargh. I see Google’s recreated the OpenSearch Description format. Nice job guys. Oh yeah, and it also functions as an RSS feed information thingy…. which as far as I can tell, only provides refresh rate…. if they need that so badly they could make that element an extension to RSS/Atom.

It seems like Google’s attitude nowadays is “developers like APIs, and they like XML, so lets create lots and lots of little tiny APIs and new XML formats.” How about a new search API, like for images. The web search API was last updated years ago… . Oh, in case we’re counting, Google now has created XML formats for sitemaps (but they accept RSS and Atom, so what was the point?), homepage modules (why not use HTML, as I’ve written before?), “buttons” (Google Toolbar), 50 (exaggeration) kinds of microcontent (Google Base), etc.

More later when I get back from school and have time to look into this more fully.