I’ve been thinking about the SSE extension and how it might be combined with Greasemonkey to fix a lot of shyste. Here’s an example: you’re reading a webpage, and you see a spelling error. You highlight the word, right click on some icon in the status bar, and select “spellcheck” or something like that. The point is that somehow, a Greasemonkey script records your correction, and whenever you visit that URL, it applies your correction.

Then, on a periodic basis, your browser contacts a website (THIS IS WHERE RAILS WOULD BE USED!) and updates an RSS + SSE feed of your corrections to the web (er, “the living web”). These feeds get aggregated, so as I’m browsing, I have a cache of Greasemonkey scripts shared and maintained in concert with people that I trust through RSS + SSE. The spelling example is minor– it could be expanded to be website commentary, adblocking (ooh! controversial!), or whatever. In fact, it has the potential to make the entire web as unreliable as Wikipedia!

I suspect that there could be scalability problems with this idea. There could also be stupidity problems.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2005 at 12:00 am and is filed under General, Open Source, Wikis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.