Web Slices

~ the eulogy ~

A feed asked you to subscribe to a whole publication when the thing you actually wanted was one box on one page. The auction you were bidding on, or the five day forecast for your city. Web Slices were Microsoft's answer to that, and the answer was to put the subscription inside the page rather than in a separate file. You wrapped the interesting region in a div with the class hslice, gave it an entry title and an entry content, and Internet Explorer 8 would find it. A green icon appeared over that part of the page. Clicking it pinned the clipping to the Favorites bar, where it sat as its own button, went bold when the underlying content changed, and opened a small flyout preview of the new version when you hovered over it.

It was announced on 5 March 2008 with the first beta of IE8, paired with a feature called Accelerators, and it was clever engineering. There was no second file to generate and keep in sync, because the markup was the page. The format defined nine properties and required three of them, with optional extras for how often to refresh in minutes and for when the slice should expire. Microsoft published it as the Web Slice Format Specification version 0.9 under its Open Specification Promise and never took it to a standards body, so 0.9 is also the last version number it ever carried.

I never saw a green slice button in the wild, and almost nobody did. By 2008 I had TTNet broadband and did my browsing in Firefox, but that is not really the explanation, because even on the office machines running IE8 the button hardly ever appeared. A Web Slice existed only where a publisher had gone into their own templates and annotated a region by hand, for the benefit of one browser, in a format no other browser read. Turkish sites did not do that work. Most sites anywhere did not do that work.

So the list of native implementations is Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9, and the list stops there. Firefox users could install WebChunks or Fireclip or PageSlices, separate add-ons that each reimplemented the idea for an audience that was curious rather than committed. Opera was rumored in 2009 to be adding support in Opera 10 and never did. Chrome's extension API could be made to fake the behavior for any page at all, and a few developers published exactly that as a demonstration.

~ the dossier ~

~ the markup, which is the whole product ~

There is not much to a Web Slice, and that was the pitch. An element carrying class="hslice" and an id, with an inner element marked class="entry-title" and another marked class="entry-content". If you wanted the browser to stop polling after a date you added an abbr with class endtime and an ISO timestamp in its title attribute. If you wanted to be polled less often you added a span with class ttl and a number of minutes. A page with several slices could name a default with a link rel="default-slice", and a page that wanted none could opt out with a meta tag reading slice and a content of off.

All of that rode on hAtom, a microformat from the loose community of people who spent the mid 2000s arguing that semantics belonged in class attributes rather than in parallel XML. Microsoft borrowed their work, extended it with the refresh and expiry properties, and shipped it to the browser with the largest installed base on earth. In 2008 that looked like the biggest win the microformat movement was ever going to get.

~ the notice on the documentation page ~

The end is written on the MSDN page for the feature, which Microsoft has since archived and which is still readable. Under a bold Important, it says that as of Internet Explorer 11 for the desktop, the Web Slice and Accelerator buttons no longer display within a webpage, and that as of May 2014 this applies to all versions of Internet Explorer starting with IE8. It then suggests using the Feed discovery button in the Command bar instead.

Read that twice. The ordinary way a browser feature dies is that the next browser declines to carry it. This one was switched off inside the three shipped browsers that already had it, by removing the only affordance that told anyone a slice was there. After May 2014 the format still worked. You just could not find out that a page offered one unless you already knew. The page's own metadata gives the last edit as 30 April 2014 and the author as Archiveddocs.

Microsoft Edge arrived the next year with none of this in it, and when IE11 was finally retired in June 2022 the last engine that could read an hslice went with it. What the format left behind is small and real: the idea that you should be able to follow a piece of a page rather than the whole page, which came back later as a category of browser extension.

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