Ubiquity Illustrates Impressive Thinking and the Need for Attribution Microformat

The net was a buzz with with Aza Raskin’s post on Ubiquity: An experiment into connecting the Web with language.

Ubiquity is an experiment two parts. It’s both an interface and a development platform. Ubiquity 0.1 focuses on the platform aspects, while beginning to explore language-driven methods of controlling the browser.

There is some really deep thinking on the entire user experience of USING the Web in everyday life. His post is like a massive “whack on the side of the head”. Particularly, when he put a mirror up to the fundamental tools on the Net.

Being relatively new to the Mozilla world, we found it difficult and time-consuming to write extensions to Firefox [ed. Or any other browser]. There is something largely last-decade about requiring restarts to add a new feature to your browsing experience. It’s ironic that the entire Web is on a push model, yet the browser—the most fundamental tool of interacting with the Web—is on a pull model.

In essence this is what his experiment is trying to tackle; he is trying to hook together millions of Web services and their content for regular users. Ubiquity’s goal is to do this without requiring a browser plug-in coder or cumbersome user installs.

Ubiquity treats extending the browser like writing websites. It’s an experiment in lowering the barrier to [fundamental] enhancing the browsing experiment.

This is certainly a big idea for Web Play, and probably one of the clearest examples illustrating the need for microformats and particularly one for content attribution

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It’s the thinking behind this that is so important. Well done!