From Samuel Sidler on the Camino Update Blog comes word that Camino 1.1B has been released.

The Beta Site has info and download links for the release which includes updated Spell Checking, new Popup Blocking and other annoyance prevention features and other goodies.

Jon Hicks has taken the idea of client side style sheets to highlight microformats that I implemented in my NNW Extract Microformats tool and ran with it. He’s cleaned up the presentation and made a user style sheet that you can use in most any mac browser—like Camino, Safari and OmniWeb (though the idea works in most other browsers as well). Combine the detection of microformats on the page via these style sheets with some bookmarklets (also provided) and you have a simple system for grabbing hcards or hcalendar events from any web site.

The downside of the client side CSS method is that you’re introducing new styles for microformat content where there may already be styles to highlight the hcards, or where the styles will otherwise clash with what the site’s author has coded. Chris Messina has posted a one example of this on Flickr. And here are two examples from Tantek’s site:

Even when there aren’t bugs, the effects of the style sheet can be gaudy or just feel out of place like in this screen shot of an article on ChunkySoup.net.

But presentational quirks aside, the idea is great and the implementation dirt simple. Its clearly a step in the right direction and another good example of how easy it is to leverage content marked up in these simple HTML based formats.

I previously had tackled the issue of subscribing to documents with embedded hAtom content by writing a script for NetNewsWire that used its ability to run special script subscriptions on the “client” side.

While the script works great, and I’ve got a number of feeds I watch from other sites this way as a publisher I still longed for a more “feed”-like and more universal, and less technical solution.

This afternoon I got one big leap closer to a solution I’m happy with.

Instead of offloading the work of parsing the html document containing the hAtom content to a client side application, or relying on a 3rd party proxy that I have no control over and may not be expecting a ton of regular traffic I’ve set up a script on my own server to act as a proxy and turn any found hAtom content at the specified address into more useful atom content¹. Through the magic of the link element I can pass the new feed url off as you would with any other atom feed and the whole process is seamless to the user.

This even works for adding feeds to hand edited pages [yes, people still do that!] or pages that otherwise don’t have a database to draw on and build multiple feeds from. You can see it in action now for the version history hAtom feeds here and here and I’ll soon be implementing it on all the non-blog pages on ChunkySoup.net.

For the curious, the screen shot is of the feed detection code soon to be added to Camino.

EDIT: I’ve just uploaded the changes to all of the individual pages on ChunkySoup.net. Look for the feed titled ‘This Page’s Atom Feed’ on pages like this to watch them for changes.

¹ using the usual suspect: hAtom2Atom.xsl

Checking in on this busy Friday afternoon with a news of a new Camino Plugin for managing user agent string, updates to this site’s monthly reports, and some interesting conference session audio.

Wevah, of derailer.org and Paparazzi! fame this week released a simple addition for Camino to manage the user agent string the browser presents to web sites in the form of a User Agent prefpane. Nifty little tool for those cases you need it, and a fun icon too.

Around these parts I finally got around to updating the Place Name Here Zeitgeist and ChunkySoup.net Zeitgeist to include information from June 2006.

And in podcast & conference news the SXSW site has recently posted a few listen-worthy sessions from their 2006 interactive event including the WaSP Annual Meeting, How to Maintain a Design Playground with Dustin & Jemma Hostetler and Curt Cloninger, Tantek Çelik & Chris Messina’s Microformat panel and others.