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"How to make use of Internet Explorer 8’s new Accelerator feature!"

[B][U]How to make use of Internet Explorer 8�s new Accelerator feature![/U][/B]

Well, Microsoft have certainly been busy with their work on Internet Explorer 8, as here I am, one more time, with a short guide to getting started with yet another IE 8 feature - Accelerators!

What are Accelerators?

Microsoft’s Accelerators are a new feature within Internet Explorer 8 that enables selected text from any web site to be sent to another web site. While this may sound somewhat basic, it does in fact enable many useful functions to be made use of.

Any available Accelerators are accessible via a contextual menu from within IE 8, and are designed to “connect” to other services from within a web page. Whenever a user highlights some text on a web page, and brings up the contextual menu, they can select any Accelerator service they have installed, and make use of the service on offer.

The inclusion of a Preview Pane is perhaps the big selling point for the Accelerators feature, as it enables the user to look at the potential results of the service without having to navigate away from the web page they are currently on. In itself, the preview is a miniature, cut-down version of the target web site.

The most used example to show off Accelerators is the use of Live Search Maps, where a user can highlight a physical address from any web site, and select the Maps on Live Maps Accelerator to be shown the address on a map within the preview pane. If that is all they need, they don’t need to go to Live Maps at all, as they have the details they wanted. If the user wants more information, they can simply click the Accelerator entry in the contextual menu to link to the full web site where a more detailed web page will be waiting.

Accelerators for Firefox!

Again, because of Mozilla’s add-ons feature, Accelerators can be used in the Firefox web browser also. The add-on is called IE8 Activities (Accelerators) for Firefox, and is designed to give the same usage of any Accelerators to Firefox users. The name “Activities” is the previous name given by Microsoft for this feature, before re-branding it later on.

If you already have Internet Explorer 8, try highlighting some of the text on this page. You should see a blue icon appear next to the text, and this enables direct access to any available Accelerators that are installed. If you right-click on the selected text, the Accelerators option will be included in the standard contextual menu that shows up. Hover over any of them to see if a preview pane appears, and click on the Accelerator name to go directly to the full web site.

In Firefox, with the IE8 Activities (Accelerators) for Firefox add-on, you will need to right-click to gain access to any installed Accelerators.

You can view many available Accelerators from the Microsoft Internet Explorer Add-ons web site.

What could I use Accelerators for?

If you have a web site that is quite interactive, such as a forum or searchable database, then you could create an Accelerator to enable your regular users quick look-up access to your web site content.

If a web site owner creates an Accelerator, they can then use this to accept any text that has been highlighted from any other web page, and manipulate it in a way that presents the user with something useful. Find on eBay allows users to search for items to bid for, while Windows LiveTranslator lets people translate from one language to another. The user simply highlights the text that has caught their eye, and selects the appropriate Accelerator.

How do my users make use of Accelerators?

If a web site has an Accelerator on offer, the user will first need to install it, and it will then appear within their Accelerators menu. Whenever they wish to use it, they simply highlight some text, and click on the blue icon that appears and navigate to the Accelerators menu option, and hover over it for the preview pane (if one exists) and click it to be taken to the full web site.

Okay, sounds interesting - how do I create an Accelerator?

Creating an Accelerator isn’t necessarily something for beginners, as it may involve delving in to your web sites existing functionality. An Accelerator is created with some code that looks like HTML, but is in fact XML, and what this does is pass instructions to Internet Explorer as to how the Accelerator should behave, and what data should be submitted back to your web site when one is being used.

However, unlike a Web Slice, you will only need to create this XML file once, and uploaded it to your web site.
The file can be created in Notepad, and be named anything you like. The important part is that the file ends with the .xml file extension, and not a .html.

As you may have guessed if you’ve looked at the screen shots linked above, I’m going to be using the Freeola cheats web site as our target for an example Accelerator, and the aim will be to enable people to search for cheats from any selected text on any other web site.

We first need to know a couple of things about the web page that will receive the information sent to it from the Accelerator (that is, the highlighted text). If we look at the source code for the Freeola Cheats web site, we see that the search form field is sent to http://cheats.freeola.com/ search/search_process.php, and that the name of the text box the user types in their desired video game is given the name attribute of “game_name”. The drop-down menu is given the name “format”, and the value is based on the user selection, but because we won’t offer this within the Accelerator, we’ll take the value “all” for this field.

Now we need to create a new file, calling it for example “freeola-cheats-accelerator.xml”, and add the basic structure to start us of, which is shown below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns=" http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0 ">

</openServiceDescription>

The above needs to appear in all Accelerators, and is just the standard way an Accelerator is built. There is no need to worry about the name openServiceDescription or the web address included.

Our Accelerator settings will need to go in-between the opening <openServiceDescription> and closing </openServiceDescription> elements, as these work as the container for the whole Accelerator.

We need to add the <homepageURL> element, which contains the web address of our Accelerator, which in this case, would be Freeola’s Cheats web site address:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns=" http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0 ">
[B]<homepageUrl> [I]http://cheats.freeola.com/[/I] </homepageUrl>[/B]

</openServiceDescription>

Next up, we need to include a <display> element, and include a <name> element to hold the name of our Accelerator. If you wish, you can also include the location of your web site favourites icon:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns=" http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0 ">
<homepageUrl> http://cheats.freeola.com/ </homepageUrl>
[B]<display>
<name>[I]Cheats from Freeola[/I]</name>
<icon>[I] http://cheats.freeola.com/favicon.ico[/I]</icon>
</display>[/B]
</openServiceDescription>

It is a good idea to include an icon if you have one, as this gives a visual representation of your Accelerator to users, and is somewhat expected these days.

And finally, we need to create an area where all our other settings for the Accelerator will go, and these are all contained within the <activity> and the <activityAction> elements. Within the <activity> element, you need to set a category attribute, defining what your Accelerator will do, so in this case, we’ll place it in the category of “cheats”, and within the <activityAction> element, you need to set a context attribute with a value of "selection":

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns=" http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0 ">
<homepageUrl> http://cheats.freeola.com/ </homepageUrl>
<display>
<name>Cheats from Freeola</name>
<icon> http://cheats.freeola.com/favicon.ico </icon>
</display>
[B]<activity category="[I]cheats[/I]">
<activityAction context="[I]selection[/I]">

</activityAction>
</activity>[/B]
</openServiceDescription>

Now that we have our structure done, we now need to set up a preview pane and an action for when the Accelerator is clicked.

Sneaky preview!

The preview pane, as mentioned before, pops up from out of the Accelerator and shows a small window that can house a mini web site. In this pane, a site can offer a small snippet of what the Accelerator will do, or perform the whole Accelerator task.

With the information we’ve got above, we know the web address that is used to submit a cheats search, and this will be contained as an action attribute within the <preview> element, which will also need a method attribute. This value is either “post” or “get”, and in this case, as Freeola use the post method, so will our Accelerator:

<preview [B]action="[I] http://cheats.freeola.com/search/ search_process.php [/I]"[/B] [B]method="[I]post[/I]"[/B]>

</preview>

Within the <preview> element, we need to set up some <parameter> elements that hold some settings. These settings will be passed on to the web address listed within the <preview> element.

Each <parameter> contains a name and value attribute. One of these values will need to be the special instruction [B]{selection}[/B], as this will represent the text that the user selected. Because our example Accelerator is linked to Freeola’s Cheats, we will use the “game_name” value for the name attribute, so that when a user selects some text and uses the Accelerator, Freeola’s Cheat site knows that the highlighted text is a game title search. We also need to include the “all” value for the parameter with the name “format”, so that the cheats site knows to search for all formats:

<preview action=" http://cheats.freeola.com/search/ search_process.php " method="post">
[B]<parameter name="[I]game_name[/I]" value="[I]{selection}[/I]"/>
<parameter name="[I]format[/I]" value="[I]all[/I]"/>[/b]
</preview>

Execution!

The <execute> element can hold the same settings as above, but is designed for when the user clicks the Accelerator to get to the full web site. You might want to use different settings here to get a different result, but for this example, we just want a full page cheat search, and so will use the same settings as above, to give us:

<[B]execute[/B] action="http://cheats.freeola.com/search/ search_process.php" method="post">
<parameter name="game_name" value="{selection}"/>
<parameter name="format" value="all"/>
</[B]execute[/B]>

Both the <preview> and <execute> element blocks will need to go within the <activityAction> section of your XML file.

The final code!

With that, the final XML code should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns=" http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0 ">
<homepageUrl>[B] http://cheats.freeola.com/ [/B]</homepageUrl>
<display>
<name>[B]Cheats from Freeola[/B]</name>
<icon>[B]http://cheats.freeola.com/favicon.ico [/B]</icon>
</display>
<activity category="[B]cheats[/B]">
<activityAction context="[B]selection[/B]">
<preview action=" [B]http://cheats.freeola.com/search/ search_process.php[/B] " method="post">
<parameter name="[B]game_name[/B]" value="[B]{selection}[/B]"/>
<parameter name="[B]format[/B]" value="[B]all[/B]"/>
</preview>
<execute action=" [B]http://cheats.freeola.com/search/ search_process.php[/B] " method="post">
<parameter name="[B]game_name[/B]" value="[B]{selection}[/B]"/>
<parameter name="[B]format[/B]" value="[B]all[/B]"/>
</execute>
</activityAction>
</activity>
</openServiceDescription>

All you need to do now is upload it to your web site, with your own web site details in place of course, and you have yourself an Accelerator!!!!

How does the user install my Accelerator!

You can use a little JavaScript to offer your Accelerator to any user whose browser supports them. There are a number of ways to do this, but a quick and easy way is to use the code below:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (typeof (window.external.AddService) != "undefined") {
document.write("<button onclick="window.external.AddService(' [B]freeola-cheats-accelerator.xml[/B]');"> [B]Install Cheats Accelerator![/B]</button>");
}
</script>

You will need to change the name of the file to your own Accelerator XML file, and possibly the text that appears within the button. You could also use a regular link, or an image if you prefer.

The ball is in your court!

I’ve uploaded the example Web Accelerator for Freeola for you to try out and have a look at, so feel free to look at the source code to see how it’s done. Installing either (or both) with give you access to a Web Accelerator that enables you to search for cheats or walkthroughs from Freeola web sites. It is important to note, that because Freeola haven’t got a custom “preview[/I]” page, I’ve just used the standard page in the window that appears, which you won’t be able to see much off. It’s an example of the fact that we can use the preview pane.

What you choose to use a Web Accelerator for is down to you (if indeed, you feel the need to have one), but this article should have covered enough for you to get started and create a Web Accelerator that can access your web site with text that users selected from any other web page on the Internet.

Enjoy!

To Freeola!

If you want to create a preview page, I’ve included the parameter display with a value of “preview” or “full”, so if you wanted to sniff for the “preview” variable and strip out the other content from the page, I think it’ll show quite nicely in the preview pane. I’ve also included a parameter to show that an Accelerator has been used, and of the web site address where the search is coming from.

Another option would be for the preview window to show that if a cheat isn’t on your database, a direct link to add it could be provided, inviting easy addition of cheats by users, as they don’t need to type the cheat out again.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

As always, any comments, questions, and especially corrections are welcome.

[B][U]How to make use of Internet Explorer 8�s new Accelerator feature![/U][/B]

Well, Microsoft have certainly been busy with their work on Internet Explorer 8, as here I am, one more time, with a short guide to getting started with yet another IE 8 feature - Accelerators!

What are Accelerators?

Microsoft’s Accelerators are a new feature within Internet Explorer 8 that enables selected text from any web site to be sent to another web site. While this may sound somewhat basic, it does in fact enable many useful functions to be made use of.

Any available Accelerators are accessible via a contextual menu from within IE 8, and are designed to “connect” to other services from within a web page. Whenever a user highlights some text on a web page, and brings up the contextual menu, they can select any Accelerator service they have installed, and make use of the service on offer.

The inclusion of a Preview Pane is perhaps the big selling point for the Accelerators feature, as it enables the user to look at the potential results of the service without having to navigate away from the web page they are currently on. In itself, the preview is a miniature, cut-down version of the target web site.

The most used example to show off Accelerators is the use of Live Search Maps, where a user can highlight a physical address from any web site, and select the Maps on Live Maps Accelerator to be shown the address on a map within the preview pane. If that is all they need, they don’t need to go to Live Maps at all, as they have the details they wanted. If the user wants more information, they can simply click the Accelerator entry in the contextual menu to link to the full web site where a more detailed web page will be waiting.

Accelerators for Firefox!

Again, because of Mozilla’s add-ons feature, Accelerators can be used in the Firefox web browser also. The add-on is called IE8 Activities (Accelerators) for Firefox, and is designed to give the same usage of any Accelerators to Firefox users. The name “Activities” is the previous name given by Microsoft for this feature, before re-branding it later on.

If you already have Internet Explorer 8, try highlighting some of the text on this page. You should see a blue icon appear next to the text, and this enables direct access to any available Accelerators that are installed. If you right-click on the selected text, the Accelerators option will be included in the standard contextual menu that shows up. Hover over any of them to see if a preview pane appears, and click on the Accelerator name to go directly to the full web site.

In Firefox, with the IE8 Activities (Accelerators) for Firefox add-on, you will need to right-click to gain access to any installed Accelerators.

You can view many available Accelerators from the Microsoft Internet Explorer Add-ons web site.

What could I use Accelerators for?

If you have a web site that is quite interactive, such as a forum or searchable database, then you could create an Accelerator to enable your regular users quick look-up access to your web site content.

If a web site owner creates an Accelerator, they can then use this to accept any text that has been highlighted from any other web page, and manipulate it in a way that presents the user with something useful. Find on eBay allows users to search for items to bid for, while Windows LiveTranslator lets people translate from one language to another. The user simply highlights the text that has caught their eye, and selects the appropriate Accelerator.

How do my users make use of Accelerators?

If a web site has an Accelerator on offer, the user will first need to install it, and it will then appear within their Accelerators menu. Whenever they wish to use it, they simply highlight some text, and click on the blue icon that appears and navigate to the Accelerators menu option, and hover over it for the preview pane (if one exists) and click it to be taken to the full web site.

Okay, sounds interesting - how do I create an Accelerator?

Creating an Accelerator isn’t necessarily something for beginners, as it may involve delving in to your web sites existing functionality. An Accelerator is created with some code that looks like HTML, but is in fact XML, and what this does is pass instructions to Internet Explorer as to how the Accelerator should behave, and what data should be submitted back to your web site when one is being used.

However, unlike a Web Slice, you will only need to create this XML file once, and uploaded it to your web site.
The file can be created in Notepad, and be named anything you like. The important part is that the file ends with the .xml file extension, and not a .html.

As you may have guessed if you’ve looked at the screen shots linked above, I’m going to be using the Freeola cheats web site as our target for an example Accelerator, and the aim will be to enable people to search for cheats from any selected text on any other web site.

We first need to know a couple of things about the web page that will receive the information sent to it from the Accelerator (that is, the highlighted text). If we look at the source code for the Freeola Cheats web site, we see that the search form field is sent to http://cheats.freeola.com/ search/search_process.php, and that the name of the text box the user types in their desired video game is given the name attribute of “game_name”. The drop-down menu is given the name “format”, and the value is based on the user selection, but because we won’t offer this within the Accelerator, we’ll take the value “all” for this field.

Now we need to create a new file, calling it for example “freeola-cheats-accelerator.xml”, and add the basic structure to start us of, which is shown below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns=" http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0 ">

</openServiceDescription>

The above needs to appear in all Accelerators, and is just the standard way an Accelerator is built. There is no need to worry about the name openServiceDescription or the web address included.

Our Accelerator settings will need to go in-between the opening <openServiceDescription> and closing </openServiceDescription> elements, as these work as the container for the whole Accelerator.

We need to add the <homepageURL> element, which contains the web address of our Accelerator, which in this case, would be Freeola’s Cheats web site address:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns=" http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0 ">
[B]<homepageUrl> [I]http://cheats.freeola.com/[/I] </homepageUrl>[/B]

</openServiceDescription>

Next up, we need to include a <display> element, and include a <name> element to hold the name of our Accelerator. If you wish, you can also include the location of your web site favourites icon:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns=" http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0 ">
<homepageUrl> http://cheats.freeola.com/ </homepageUrl>
[B]<display>
<name>[I]Cheats from Freeola[/I]</name>
<icon>[I] http://cheats.freeola.com/favicon.ico[/I]</icon>
</display>[/B]
</openServiceDescription>

It is a good idea to include an icon if you have one, as this gives a visual representation of your Accelerator to users, and is somewhat expected these days.

And finally, we need to create an area where all our other settings for the Accelerator will go, and these are all contained within the <activity> and the <activityAction> elements. Within the <activity> element, you need to set a category attribute, defining what your Accelerator will do, so in this case, we’ll place it in the category of “cheats”, and within the <activityAction> element, you need to set a context attribute with a value of "selection":

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns=" http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0 ">
<homepageUrl> http://cheats.freeola.com/ </homepageUrl>
<display>
<name>Cheats from Freeola</name>
<icon> http://cheats.freeola.com/favicon.ico </icon>
</display>
[B]<activity category="[I]cheats[/I]">
<activityAction context="[I]selection[/I]">

</activityAction>
</activity>[/B]
</openServiceDescription>

Now that we have our structure done, we now need to set up a preview pane and an action for when the Accelerator is clicked.

Sneaky preview!

The preview pane, as mentioned before, pops up from out of the Accelerator and shows a small window that can house a mini web site. In this pane, a site can offer a small snippet of what the Accelerator will do, or perform the whole Accelerator task.

With the information we’ve got above, we know the web address that is used to submit a cheats search, and this will be contained as an action attribute within the <preview> element, which will also need a method attribute. This value is either “post” or “get”, and in this case, as Freeola use the post method, so will our Accelerator:

<preview [B]action="[I] http://cheats.freeola.com/search/ search_process.php [/I]"[/B] [B]method="[I]post[/I]"[/B]>

</preview>

Within the <preview> element, we need to set up some <parameter> elements that hold some settings. These settings will be passed on to the web address listed within the <preview> element.

Each <parameter> contains a name and value attribute. One of these values will need to be the special instruction [B]{selection}[/B], as this will represent the text that the user selected. Because our example Accelerator is linked to Freeola’s Cheats, we will use the “game_name” value for the name attribute, so that when a user selects some text and uses the Accelerator, Freeola’s Cheat site knows that the highlighted text is a game title search. We also need to include the “all” value for the parameter with the name “format”, so that the cheats site knows to search for all formats:

<preview action=" http://cheats.freeola.com/search/ search_process.php " method="post">
[B]<parameter name="[I]game_name[/I]" value="[I]{selection}[/I]"/>
<parameter name="[I]format[/I]" value="[I]all[/I]"/>[/b]
</preview>

Execution!

The <execute> element can hold the same settings as above, but is designed for when the user clicks the Accelerator to get to the full web site. You might want to use different settings here to get a different result, but for this example, we just want a full page cheat search, and so will use the same settings as above, to give us:

<[B]execute[/B] action="http://cheats.freeola.com/search/ search_process.php" method="post">
<parameter name="game_name" value="{selection}"/>
<parameter name="format" value="all"/>
</[B]execute[/B]>

Both the <preview> and <execute> element blocks will need to go within the <activityAction> section of your XML file.

The final code!

With that, the final XML code should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns=" http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0 ">
<homepageUrl>[B] http://cheats.freeola.com/ [/B]</homepageUrl>
<display>
<name>[B]Cheats from Freeola[/B]</name>
<icon>[B]http://cheats.freeola.com/favicon.ico [/B]</icon>
</display>
<activity category="[B]cheats[/B]">
<activityAction context="[B]selection[/B]">
<preview action=" [B]http://cheats.freeola.com/search/ search_process.php[/B] " method="post">
<parameter name="[B]game_name[/B]" value="[B]{selection}[/B]"/>
<parameter name="[B]format[/B]" value="[B]all[/B]"/>
</preview>
<execute action=" [B]http://cheats.freeola.com/search/ search_process.php[/B] " method="post">
<parameter name="[B]game_name[/B]" value="[B]{selection}[/B]"/>
<parameter name="[B]format[/B]" value="[B]all[/B]"/>
</execute>
</activityAction>
</activity>
</openServiceDescription>

All you need to do now is upload it to your web site, with your own web site details in place of course, and you have yourself an Accelerator!!!!

How does the user install my Accelerator!

You can use a little JavaScript to offer your Accelerator to any user whose browser supports them. There are a number of ways to do this, but a quick and easy way is to use the code below:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (typeof (window.external.AddService) != "undefined") {
document.write("<button onclick="window.external.AddService(' [B]freeola-cheats-accelerator.xml[/B]');"> [B]Install Cheats Accelerator![/B]</button>");
}
</script>

You will need to change the name of the file to your own Accelerator XML file, and possibly the text that appears within the button. You could also use a regular link, or an image if you prefer.

The ball is in your court!

I’ve uploaded the example Web Accelerator for Freeola for you to try out and have a look at, so feel free to look at the source code to see how it’s done. Installing either (or both) with give you access to a Web Accelerator that enables you to search for cheats or walkthroughs from Freeola web sites. It is important to note, that because Freeola haven’t got a custom “preview[/I]” page, I’ve just used the standard page in the window that appears, which you won’t be able to see much off. It’s an example of the fact that we can use the preview pane.

What you choose to use a Web Accelerator for is down to you (if indeed, you feel the need to have one), but this article should have covered enough for you to get started and create a Web Accelerator that can access your web site with text that users selected from any other web page on the Internet.

Enjoy!

To Freeola!

If you want to create a preview page, I’ve included the parameter display with a value of “preview” or “full”, so if you wanted to sniff for the “preview” variable and strip out the other content from the page, I think it’ll show quite nicely in the preview pane. I’ve also included a parameter to show that an Accelerator has been used, and of the web site address where the search is coming from.

Another option would be for the preview window to show that if a cheat isn’t on your database, a direct link to add it could be provided, inviting easy addition of cheats by users, as they don’t need to type the cheat out again.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

As always, any comments, questions, and especially corrections are welcome.