This week's rant is brought to you by belated new year's resolutions and the letter FFFFFFFFfffff. (Love your work guys. Take my money and my kilos, but your recipe manager needs work).

I'm not a mobile developer. I tried learning Objective C and Swift on the plane back from New Zealand a few years back, but I knew it wasn't for me when XCode made me drag a UI event to an event handler -- eww. Who knows. Maybe things have changed. But this could be seriously cool.

Google your favourite food. You'll find a page that looks like this:

Notice the ingredients that Google have displayed? No. Skynet hasn't learned to cook yet. It's markup. JSON-LD, to be specific. In this case: https://schema.org/Recipe. This is how it works.

Wait. What's schema.org?

To be honest, I haven't really done the research, but from what I can tell, we have a bunch of big players describing the real world here in an open-sorcery kind of way, and a bunch of big players actually using these definitions. Hopefully we avoid a xkcd.com/927 situation.

So why is this potentially cool?

A lot of the human-to-machine interface is contextual. You try to provide a set of sensible choices to a user based on what they're currently working on. Windows has done this for years with shell context menu items and it certainly wasn't first to do it. In general, it works well because if you're right clicking on files,the files are your context.

No such luck with the internet however. Turns out everything is html, a video, or an image on the web, but the content usually isn't anything to do with that. So you might have IOS share actions and Android share intents , but the best they can do is upload to something or share it with someone.

The same devices that are our most personal possessions don't operate in the same domain that we do.

Just for once, I'd like to save a recipe I'm looking at without having to scroll to P for Paprika . Or get directions to the restaurant I just read about in Timeout.

Heck, it might even make the App Store not suck. I'm looking at X, show me related apps?

Or maybe google lets me search fridge-freezers that are less than 1.42m tall and have more than 35L of freezer space that I can have delivered yesterday. (sadly, 404 on schema.org/FridgeFreezerThatFitsMyWeirdKitc..).

Realistically, I doubt this will actually come to pass.

But please let this turn into a thing that's used for more than just SEO.

(side note: I wish I knew about this in 2016, when we had Selenium tests scraping HTML for data- attributes. Oh man, was that annoying)