Yesterday Microsoft finally released IE 9 Beta to the masses. To that I say HURRAY!!! I really, really like it. It almost supports HTML 5/CSS 3 completely (on that later), its really fast (in most cases) and decluttered the layout chrome. Among other things it also raised the bar in things we (developers) can do by adding Windows 7 jumplist capabilities.
As I watched this feature being demonstrated my mind pondered the use. Would 'real people' use this feature? How can I implement this? Will the other browser guys jump (LOL) on this? Why can this be useful and if actually used what will happen in the long run?
Well I have my doubts that real users will actually use this feature, they don't use 99% of the features any OS or software offers as it is and if you saw the telemetry featured yesterday you understand what I mean. That aside, implementing a jumplist is super easy too, just add a series of appropriately configured META tags to your page's header. Not sure if other browser guys will jump on the feature or not, they have added support for a few of the Redmond, WA innovations, like FavIcon. How users will actually implement jumplist remains to be seen, I have this giant fear of super large sett of pinned tabs at the bottom of their screen.
<
meta
name
="application-name"
content
="Chris' Super Secret Web Project"
/>
<
meta
name
="msapplication-tooltip"
content
="Launch Chris' Secret Web Site"
/>
<
meta
name
="msapplication-task"
content
="name=Home;action-uri=/;icon-uri=/Favorite.ico"
/>
<
meta
name
="msapplication-task"
content
="name=Category 1;action-uri=/cat1/;icon-uri=/images/greenball.ico"
/>
<
meta
name
="msapplication-task"
content
="name=Help;action-uri=/help;icon-uri=/images/helppurple.ico"
/>
<
link
rel
="shortcut icon"
href
="/images/Favorite.ico"
/>
Well why should you add this feature to your site? Its akin to taking the time to create a mobile application that wraps your web site (which according to what I have been told is about 80% of mobile apps) so you get your company's icon on the user's phone background. Its a marketing thing if nothing else. While IE 9 is the only browser to support this, so what, its easy to implement, it should take about 30 minutes of your time. Most of that is to decide what URLs to include. Now if you work in the government or a large corporation this will probably take 3-6 months so plan accordingly.
Now, this morning I saw a tweet linking to this complaining post about IE 9 jumplist. To this author I say, GET OFF MY LAWN!!!. First, this has nothing to do with FavIcon, which I believe to be great innovation even if 99% of websites are not smart enough to implement it correctly. His suggestions is to move the meta information and that is what the jumplist designation is, meta data, to an HTML 5 MENU element. This is a really bad idea. First they want to set the display to none on the element, which just makes it meta data that clutters the markup. Now you have an extra element inside the content part of the page that is hidden.
META tags are great tools to embed information that can be used to direct the browser or search engine spider about your page and site. Does the author want to remove the META description tag usage for a hidden H1 element? Doubt it, and those tags are important in generating traffic from search engines. Just ask any real SEO engineer.
So while I am a bit hesitant as to the actual adoption of jumpllists by users and even web architects I like the feature. It gives me more ways to describe the important aspects of my site in an unobtrusive manner. If you don't like, don't use it, oh and get off my lawn. Have a nice day. :)
