WebSlices in WebStudio

WebSlices are a feature introduced in Internet Explorer 8. A portion of your web page is WebSlice-enabled by adding some code to it. When a visitor hovers their mouse pointer over that content they will see a partial border around the content to show them that they can "subscribe" to it. If they click on the icon beside the border and select "Add", a link is added to the "Favorites bar" in Internet Explorer. Unlike a conventional favorites link, clicking on a WebSlice link will display a small popup window just below the Favorites bar which contains only the content in that section of the page and IE will automatically check and update the slice at regular intervals. Say, for example, that you have a section of your site which contains news headlines or special offers. By making that content into a WebSlice, your visitors can watch out for updates without having to load the whole site into their browser.

To keep this simple so that it will work in WS without too much trouble, the WebSlice must be a single text object or image.

Add a text object to your page and add some content with links, etc. To make that text object into a WebSlice, right click on it, go to Properties > Object HTML and add this code to "Inside Of Page Division Tag":

class="hslice"><div class="entry-title">MyStore Deals</div><div class="entry-content"

The only part of that which you need to edit is "MyStore Deals" - this will be the text which appears on the Favorites Bar. Keep the title descriptive but fairly short as it will appear truncated on the Favorites bar if it's more than about 30 characters. If you have more than one slice, try to give them all unique names so that it doesn't confuse your visitor.

Still in the Object HTML section of the text object, click on After The Object and enter this code:

</div>

Finally, to prevent the "MyStore Deals" text from appearing on the page, go to Page Properties > Page HTML > Inside Page Header and add this code:

<style type="text/css"> .entry-title {display:none} </style>

When you view the page outside of WS with a WebSlice-enabled browser (either in the Preview folder or online) and mouse over that object, you'll see a border around it:

Clicking on the icon will give the user the option to subscribe to that slice:

If the user subscribes, the link is added to the Favorites bar and clicking on it shows just that segment of the page in a popup:

To maintain the link between your WebSlice-enabled text object or image and people's WebSlice bookmarks, the original object must be edited, not replaced (all objects in WS have a unique ID number), the OWS file name should remain the same if you're uploading the site with WS, as should the page name.

Page background images and colors (other than white) will not appear in the WebSlice popup window unless they are defined in a separate Style declaration in the Head section of the page. Text background colors will be displayed just as they appear in WS.

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