With all the talk about Yahoo 2.0, Web 2.0, and Bubble 2.0 I was thinking maybe we could start talking about bookmarklets 2.0.
Seriously. The whole bookmarklets thing was kind of a hack to begin with.
1. Developing bookmarklets is horrible since they have to be all on one line.
2. There is no package format. No icons, no UI, etc.
3. You can’t update bookmarklets once they are in the field.
Is there anything we can do about this? It would be sweet to have someone like the Mozilla foundation push forward on this issue. Now that IE 7.0 is moving forward maybe we could see them adopt a new bookmarklet technology. I’m sure Safari would have no problem doing this either.
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November 19, 2005 at 8:10 pm
Have you seen this?
http://www.blummy.com/
November 19, 2005 at 8:59 pm
A “build” process would solve no. 1, all you need to do is one-line a JavaScript file. I had to do something similar to merge multiple scripts into a single Greasemonkey file.
And you can solve no. 2 by having the bookmarklet ping a service to check for new versions, and take the user to a page where they can add the new bookmarklet.
But yes, neither is pretty, a user-friendly UI with automatic upgrade (a la Firefox extensions) would be great.
December 21, 2005 at 3:54 pm
It sounds like you’re describing Greasemonkey.
It addresses 1 and 2 at least.