Contents
Overview
The Tails Firefox Extension allows you to view microformats embedded on a web page, and perform customizable actions on the microformats via Tails Scripts.
Latest Release: Tails Firefox Extension 0.3.8 (8/5/2007) (Firefox 1.4+, Flock 1.0+). This release just updates the plugin to be installable in Flock 1.0. You can read about the 0.3.7 release here.
If you’re interested in the older versions of Tails, you can read about it here. You can also read about the obsolete Flocktails extension here.
The Tails extension is an open source project, you can get the source and view current Tails issues here.
Supported Microformats
- Contact Information (hCard)
- Calendar Information (hCalendar)
- Reviews (hReviews)
- Bookmarks (xFolk)
- Blog Entries (hAtom)
- Resumes (hResume)
- Map Coordinates (geo)
Don't Forget to Plant It! 
so first of all: thx for this great extension.
very good idea to implement the tails script approach!
the only thing I am not satisfied with, is the new interface.
I think it’s unnecassary to big, covers my content, is not resizeable, bring me no added value and disturbs me in anyway …
but aside from this: great job!
Any chance of someone porting this to Camino using SIMBL or the like? It doesn’t use much XUL and if the JS could be injected into every page viewed it should port quite nicely.
Another plea for a Camino port! I’m not sure how possible it could be, but it would be most welcome!
Wow. Calvin, I’d no idea you’d done so much work on this extension. This is awesome… any chance you can open source this or add it to the Microformats HG repository?
One suggestion:
Would it be possible to change the presentation of embedded hCards?
For example hCards within hCalendars or hAtoms.
It would be nice to see them in relation to their “paren-format” and not as single hCards.
Cheers
Hmmm… even on local.yahoo I get a “No importable cards were found” error. Seems like the .vcf extension is not properly applied to the vcard and nothing is placed into Address Book (OS X). Any suggestions?
-Eric
pixelsebi,
Yeah, I’ve been trying to figure out what would the best way to display the relationships between parent/child microformats. My latest thought would be to display a label identifying the role of the microformat in relation to its parent. So for example, the hCard of the reviewer of a hReview will have a label that says ‘Reviewer of‘. And maybe I would make this label link to the actual hReview.
Any thoughts?
eric,
You must be using the Tails Export extension, because I don’t believe my Tails extension generates that error message.
The Tails Export extension is maintained by Robert de Bruin, whose website is here: http://bordewolf.blogspot.com/
My Tails extension will generate a vcard, but also doesn’t generate a .vcf extension. It does create the appropriate mime type, which should work (I’m using Ubuntu so I can’t test it out for you).
Hello, I just downloaded the newest version of Tails (0.3.2), but i can’t seem to be able to install your scripts. I just hangs at “Downloading script…”.
Here’s my Firefox version:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6
Thanks a lot!!
Sorry about that – I need to remember to do more testing before releasing in the future. I’ve put up a 3.3 release to resolve this issue.
Thanks, everything seems to work now!!
great work!
have some suggestions:
is there a possibility to bring back the flock toolbar as of flocktails in tails 0.3? it’s less intrusive and more flock-like 🙂
what i like about the new plugin is that it’s possible to filter the types (all/events/contacts) and the display is cleaner.
but makes me stick to flocktails for the moment is, that despite the cleaner display of events or cards in tails 0.3 some information is missing. e.g. on a event the date is rendered, but the time the event happens doesn’t show up. try it on http://www.gustavus.edu/events/nobelconference/2006/schedule.cfm and compare it to the output of flocktails
I am unsure if I have coded something wrong or not, but does your extension set up to show the street-address class or is that only pulled through into the .vcf file?
If the general concencus is not to show it using any extentions but wait until it’s been saved I’ll stop pulling out (what’s left) of my hair 🙂
The extension currently does not show the street-address for hCards, although the parser will look for it (you’ll see it in the .vcf file or you’ll be able to map it provided that you have the scripts installed).
I will eventually offer some kind of detail view so you’ll be able to see all the values I parse out – no ETA on when that’ll be.
Thx for the great work – I use 0.3.3 and found that uninstall of script blocks the OK button (on Mac) – Cancel is the only way out – but that leaves the script alive. Workaround – uninstall manually: in Firefox Profile -> tails_scripts – delete JS and remove the section in config.xml.
Created some scripts useful for users in Switzerland: http://www.keepthebyte.ch/2006/08/tails-firefox-extension-scripts-for.html
Cool – thanks for pointing the problem, I’ved made the necessary fixes and they’ll be in the next release.
Thanks for clearing the street-address question up. It’s a great extention and I look forward to the release.
Hi Calvin,
I think you have your first two script descriptions backtofront – or is it the script names that are wrong 😉
Cheers,
MarkL
Fixed, thanks for pointing it out.
Calvin,
thanks for this great plug-in.
Question: ever since installing vs 3.3 I get an error message when opening a new window saying: “TypeError: this.docShell has no properties”. I didn’t have that porblem with vs2.0.5. Any idea what causes this and how to solve this?
Request: I’m not to good at writing a tail.js but have a request for somebody who is. I would really like a tail.js that just enable me to save the detected hcal as ics file (feature in vs 2.0.5)
Tip: at the end of this week we from http://www.markthisdate.com will have our hugh calendar dbase microformat available.
Cheers,
Rutger
Rutger,
I’ve seen this error occaisionally as well, but I could never determine whether this was coming from Tails or from another one of my installed extensions. If someone out there has any idea on how I can get more information about that message, please comment or shoot me an email (some sort of stack trace would be nice), I tried searching but came up with nothing. Also, it would help if anyone knows a website that can reliably repeat this error.
wonderful job!
thank you so much for this great extension!
gentax
Maybe you should put the tails scripts on a separate page or at least give them an anchor so we can link to them directly. I totally missed them the first time I came, and ended up thinking Tails was a bit lame even though it was cool because it didn’t allow me to do anything with the detected microformats.
Hey, I find this extension really handy. One thing I’ve noticed though is that it seems to ignore the ‘extended-address’ field that’s part of the hCard spec.
There is a bug in hCalendar. It only interprets YYYYMMDDTHHII correctly, but it should support YYYY-MM-DD for dates and HH:II for times to.
See Microformats Wiki,
Thanks, I’ll try to get this corrected for the next release.
Bug: When you go to a website A that has microformats, then click through to a website B that has no microformats and then hit the back button back to A, the Tails extension doesn’t recognize the microformats on A anymore (v0.3.4).
For example: go to http://www.microformats.org (lots of microformats) and click the hcard link in the overview (their wiki has no formats), then hit backspace to go back. The icon stays dark. Going even furter back (to this page for example) still doesn’t wake Tails.
I have marked up the link to a PDF on:
http://www.westmidlandbirdclub.com/ladywalk/maps.htm
with the attribute
rel=”enlcosure”
I can see the use of a FireFox extension which lists all such attachments
(“enclosures”) on a page. Perhaps ‘Tails’ might do so?
Tails is displaying the start and end times of events on, e.g.
http://www.westmidlandbirdclub.com/diary/2006-10.htm
as the real time at which I’m viewing them!
Andy,
This issue has been fixed and will be in the next release (my plan is to have it out by this weekend).
Thanks,
Calvin
Thank you – any comment on my ‘ rel=”enclosure” ‘ query?
Andy,
I apologize for not initially responding to your rel=enclosure query – I wanted to understand a little bit more of what it is about before I commented. I’ve been avoiding any kind of rel attribute support for fear of how it would impact parsing performance. HST, I think I just came up with a way that might work.
I’m going to create a ticket for it, and see about putting it into a future release.
Calvin
Awesome extension!
Thanks Calvin!
Thanks for fixing the time issue; and for considering “enclosures”
Tails does not find the e-mail addresses in:
http://www.westmidlandbirdclub.com/club/executive.htm
(even if the spans are removed from them)
They are found by the “Almost Universal Microformat Parser”:
http://tools.blogmatrix.com/extract/
Great extension, thanks
Great work. Microformats are unleashing the real power of the internet.
Is the Tails extension supposed to work with microformats generated on the client side, for example 🙂 following an AJAX request and some js processing ? If not, is it technically impossible or is there a chance that it may become possible in a future release ?
Philippe,
I don’t think its technically impossible, but I don’t think its going to be trivial either. If you know of any sites that does this, let me know so I can be sure to test against them.
Calvin
Andy,
Thanks for pointing out the email address problem – it will be fixed in the next release.
Calvin
Your extension seems to have problems with a hResume with an affiliation in it. See e.g. http://robert.o-rourke.org/, it thinks his resume belongs to his school…
Bart,
Fixed. Thanks for the report.
Calvin
Digging a little deeper into Bart’s findings, I don’t think it’s specifically a problem with the affiliation. In general, it seems that if there is more than one instance of an hCard in an hResume, Tails uses the last instance of an hCard on the page as the hCard of the subject.
Distinguishing an hCard as the contact info for the resume author is a documented issue on http://microformats.org/wiki/hresume-issues.
Some of the proposed solutions include:
1) using a secondary class name such as ‘contact’ on the authors hCard.
2) using the first instance of an hCard as the subject’s hCard.
3) using the element for the the subject’s hCard.
I think option number 1 is a solid idea. A lot of hResume authors have used the class name of ‘contact’, but this was most likely due to a misunderstanding of the draft specification. There is most likely going to be need for an hCard type, not just in hResume, but in other cases too.
In the case of Tails and hResume, and in advance of further specification development, if I were going to change anything right now, I would probably have the parser use the first instance of an hCard as the subject’s hCard.
Steve,
Yes, that’s the way I fixed the problem in Bart’s case – I’m using the first hCard as the resume’s contact. Tails will also use the contact class (I also thought that was valid in the draft spec, and now am reluctant to remove it) and vcards defined in address blocks as contacts.
Calvin, it sounds like you have all your bases covered. I had a discussion with Brian Suda about this recently. The class name of “contact” is valid and should be used, but so far it has not been required. I have a strong feeling that it will eventually be specified as required in the future. Further, I am working on an implementation right now for LinkedIn and we will definitely be using the “contact” class on the hResume subject’s hCard.
Thanks so much for all your hard work on this!
What happens if an hcard has multiple email addresses? I notice that object.email is just one string? Not an array like tel?
Tags are extracted incorrectly. As stated in the specification, it’s the last segment of the path that defines the tag, not the link text. As per the example in the spec:
<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/tech” rel=”tag”>fish</a>
the tag is “tech”, not “fish”. However, Tails uses the link text instead of the last segment of the linked URL.
I had been developing a site using hReview and testing with a previous version of Tails (I think .3.1) and all was working well. In particular, I was interested in ensuring that multiple ratings would show up, as in the example of a Multidimensional Restaurant Review
In the older version, both my paragraphical “description” and the multidimensional rating (within the description) would display.
However, in .3.7, only the numbers for the ratings showed – none of the other descriptive content. When I removed those ratings, the content showed up.
Wish I could send you a link, but it’s in-house at the moment.
E.g.:
Should see…
Maecenas sed sapien. Phasellus posuere. Sed lacinia tempor felis. Donec pede eros, molestie quis, malesuada in, semper vel, lectus.
Staff: 5, Bed: 4, Value: 3
Instead, now seeing…
543
odd… ideas?
Thx for the great extension. This helps to see the realy benefit of all the coding efforts 🙂
Thanks for the work on the extension. Unfortunately I can’t install it on the newest version of Flock (0.9.0.1) as it identifies itself as working with versions of Flock up to “0.7+” (I can’t work out whether this is actually a Flock bug or not). Any chance of a fix soon?
Douglas,
I’ll carve out sometime this weekend and see if I can get it running on 0.9.0.1
Thanks,
Calvin
Same problem with my Flock installation (0.9.0.1). Would be cool if you could fix it 🙂
I’ve updated the version # so that it’ll work with the latest Flock, and didn’t notice any incompatibilities. Here’s the URL:
http://codeeg.com/tails/tails-0.3.8.xpi
-Calvin
THX Clavin! This one works perfect! 🙂
Same problem with my Flock installation
FYI/ Had to manually install to get anything above tails-0.3.4.xpi. not sure if this is a FAQ.
Also, please update link at top of page to reflect tails-0.3.8 instead of 0.3.7.
Thanks for the great product.
–K
Excellent Extension, Really Useful!
Thanks for pointing that out, Keenan. I’ve updated all the relevant links to point to 0.3.8
— Calvin
I seem to be having a problem with this one… http://codeeg.com/tails/tails-0.3.8.xpi didn’t work for me???
I’m not seeing any problems with that current release.
What was the exact nature of your error? What browser and version are you using?
-Calvin
Hi,
Excellent Extension.
Is there a way to have the source code ? There is no download available on code.google.com. Have you plan to release a version of Tails ?
You can get the source code from Google Code provided that you have experience with using Subversion. If not, you can download the *.xpi file, change the extension from .xpi to .zip, and decompress it using a program like WinZip. All the source is in that file.
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I like this extension. Although I have a little question. Using not the standard-rating-system, but my own system (0 to 10; including class=”value” and class=”best”), tails will only show me e.g. 7/5 (seven out of five) though it should be 7/10. Can anyone reproduce this or is it a glitch?
I think the hReview spec specifies that ratings are on the scale of 0-5:
http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview
Yes, that is the standard. But under “rating”, we can find: “Optionally a different integral ‘worst’ value and/or ‘best’ value MAY be specified to indicate a different range (e.g. 6 from 0-10).” And have a look at the “Multidimensional Restaurant Review”-example. There Tantek uses a scale up to 30 – but tails shows only 18/5. 😦
I see. I don’t actively maintain Tails anymore, but I’ll put it on my list of things to do. Thanks!
Calvin
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Is the version 0.3.8 not compatible with firefox 3?
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Why don’t you add this to the Firefox extensions page? I always have to Google this page after I install a new Firefox browser and keep forgetting the name (too similar to the other Tails add-on).
To be honest I’m really too busy to do active maintenance on this add-on these days, that’s primarily the reason it’s not on the Firefox extensions page.
Also, the Operator Add-on is probably a better microformats extension, and it has someone doing active maintenance on it. Right now I don’t have a reason to duplicate that effort.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4106
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