Not long back I wrote about malleable web surfaces and the browser plugin Stylish for customizing stylesheets. The example I shared was a retro modification of the twitter web UI with a larger content area and narrower sidebar. Since that time I couldn't put the idea of personal HTML data views down. Web data that is openly shared suffers a restriction on how it's composed that is easily remedied with adaptive web portals.
Could the browser plugin idea of stylish be extended or mimicked with JavaScript?
Can the the process of crafting web portals be made more social?
Should it be?
Yes, yes and yes!
Today I began working on a visual web design tool called Connected Canvas that leverages javascript to make most aspects of web pages configurable. There's not much of anything in the repository yet. I have to overcome some technical hurdles highlighting div and partitions and adding visual interface frames. Luckily there's already an excellent utility for the task at hand.
jQuery and jQuery UI are rich toolkits for selecting page portions and modifying them on the fly (selector, draggable). There are a few outstanding design decisions I have to make to easily share customized interfaces: new html files, unique urls (like jsfiddle), shared database, etc. I've seen what services like Netvibes have done with portal crafting, but I'd like to take the concept further and open up UI adaption to all existing web sites.