I think the best way to do it would be an XML file referenced from a meta tag. This is a property of websites, not web pages, so it makes sense to put all the information in one place.<p><pre><code> <!-- page.html -->
<meta name="msapplication-jumplist" content="http://arstechnica.com/jumplist.xml">
<!-- jumplist.xml -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<jumplist>
<name>Ars Technica</name>
<starturl>http://arstechnica.com/</starturl>
<tooltip>Ars Technica: Serving the technologist for 1.2 decades</tooltip>
<task>
<name>News</name>
<action-uri>http://arstechnica.com/</action-uri>
<icon-uri>http://arstechnica.com/favicon.ico</icon-uri>
</task>
<task>
<name>Features</name>
<action-uri>http://arstechnica.com/features/</action-uri>
<icon-uri>http://static.arstechnica.net/ie-jump-menu/jump-features.ico</icon-uri>
</task>
<!-- etc -->
</jumplist></code></pre>
I can tell you right away what their response will be, and it is that meta extensions are an accepted way of extending HTML5 with browser-specific features, see:<p><a href="http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/MetaExtensions" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/MetaExtensions</a><p><i>"You may add your own values to this list, which makes them legal HTML5 metadata names. We ask that you try to avoid redundancy; if someone has already defined a name that does roughly what you want, please reuse it."</i><p>They will also argue that menu is intended to create toolbars and menus within a webpage, not within the browser itself - and that by using meta extensions, the IE team have implemented their browser-specific extensions in a standards-based way supported by the WHATWG. They will say that it also doesn't pollute the markup with an extension that only applies to a single browser on a single platform (which is why WHATWG developed the meta extensions). In short, pages that implement this are HTML5 compliant.<p>Now my own opinion. The browser makers need differentiation between their products. Browser market share is as important, if not more important, than OS market share.<p>If Microsoft want to enable websites to deeply integrate with a Windows desktop by using meta extensions, then that seems like the right place to do it. A lot of us would prefer that every browser maker simply implements the standards, but a lot of innovation in web technologies (img tag, applets, xmlhttprequest) started life as browser-specific extensions. Frowning upon, or not allowing any differentiation would remove a lot of motivation for pouring resources into browser development.<p>As much as we might not like it, we have to deal with it - at least they put this extension in the right place with meta instead of not implementing menu properly or doing their own implementation of menu (besides, I can't think how this desktop pinning would work on for eg. OS X and Chrome - it seems something very 'active desktop' windows specific).
Wow, weird to see markup of mine show up in a blog somewhere.<p>Meta tags are the most standards compliant way to do those jump menus. I don't buy the idea of hijacking a menu tag to alter browser chrome. From an implementation perspective, I'd much rather they let me link to a manifest file of some kind than add multiple meta tags in places, but it's not a horrible choice.<p>As an aside, I can tell you that if they'd implemented it as a menu tag, we wouldn't have put it on Ars for the purposes of that article.
I don't know if I buy it. The jump list isn't really part of the page itself, it's metadata attached to the 'website' in question, so I sort of understand them putting it in <meta>... at the very least, I don't think it makes sense as an inline <menu> element in the middle of the page content. It sucks having all those meta tags there, though, since that's a huge blob of html that has to go in the header of every page when it really should live in a metadata file somewhere on your site... sort of like a stylesheet.
Speaking of stopping the madness, this guy's website uses a fixed viewport that prevents iPad Safari from zooming in and out. Stop the madness, indeed.
They have a point, but... <menu> != what they did. It's an add-on for an <i>external</i> menu on IE <i>in Windows</i>; extensions make sense there.
<i>sigh</i> This again? Okay, Apple does the same thing with meta tags and links. I don't see the issue here. MS is using the standards. I mean, this guy is basically asking for MS to break with convention and do something people might not have intended. Rather, this way is explicit.
I see three different 'issues':<p>- should we allow companies to bend the standard in order to innovate?
- is this implementation a good way to implement this innovation?
- is this an innovation that we would like to see on other OSes?<p>I think the answers to these questions should be yes, no, and maybe. The 'yes' is because that is the norm, and it hasn't turned out bad. The 'no' is for two reasons:<p>- as others indicated, putting this stuff in an external file makes more sense.
- terminology could be made a bit more platform independent.<p>The 'maybe' is because I think this innovation will turn out to be useful. Other OSes or browsers could implement the way to activate in a completely different way. On the other hand, I do not quite see how this is different from a bookmark that the browser UI knows to display in a small pop-up window. A single meta-tag that indicates 'show this URL in a small borderless window close to what you think is the point it was opened from', plus some Javascript call 'ask the user to put the following URL in his start menu' could do most, if not all what this tries to accomplish. Splitting this into parts has the advantage that it promotes reuse.
If you read what you saw and it made absolutely no sense, there is actually more below the image. The footer makes it look like the article has ended. It's like a frame but with no apparent scrollbar. Terrible non-intuitive webdesign (sure looks fancy though).<p>Here is how it looks like for me: <a href="http://s1.image.gd/o/d6/d63da036dc4e2e93670dac425ca017d9b2278fb7.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://s1.image.gd/o/d6/d63da036dc4e2e93670dac425ca017d9b227...</a>
I don't have access to IE9, but maybe it's possible to create the necessary meta tags using javascript to clone a <menu> (or <nav> or a list with links for that matter) the same way jQTouch creates the apple meta-tags on the fly?<p>I'm guessing this will be in a jQuery plugin very soon.
Wait, hang on... Why can't a microdata format be used for this? It seems like it would be a perfect fit to me. Granted, I've never actually used microdata, but from what I've read...
A jump list isn't an HTML document - I'm not sure describing it with html tags makes sense, since it'd be too easy to write invalid jumplist markup that's valid HTML. I could envisage somehow replacing RSS with HTML (use the right tags, in the right order, don't use the wrong tags), but it wouldn't make much sense.
"This is the exact same kind of terrible, short-sighted, browser-specific garglemesh that plagued the web with favicon.ico a Microsoft only image format that forced a specific file name and location (and generates billions of 404s across the web every day)."<p>Hmm. With the iPod, there's the apple-touch-icon.png