link preview agent — n. a user agent that crawls a web page for text, image(s), link(s) etc. to make a link preview https://indieweb.org/link-preview.
@24ways (ht @KevinMarks): it’s not a “microbrowser” (already an alias for mobile browser^1) #xkcd386
^1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/microbrowser
Web searches also reveal that existing definition for “microbrowser”:
E.g. all first page results on:
@DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=microbrowser
@Google (which even shows a onebox definition for it!): https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=microbrowser
It’s futile to attempt to redefine longstanding term/phrase like that.
Always research what you think is a new term or phrase before attempting to define it.
At a minimum do a couple of web searches and check @Wikipedia.
To be fair, naming things is hard (https://tantek.com/t44u2).
To be clear, it’s *good* to identify a thing or class of things that exists but isn’t named, and give it a name, so we can talk about it. Reminded me of @timoreilly’s talk at the 2013 Brooklyn Beta (https://tantek.com/t4SV1).
Instead, when naming something, start with trying a name that is descriptive. E.g. as the @24ways article already mentions “link preview” as the canonical phrase for the thing that is generated and shown, it makes more sense to define “link preview agent” as:
“a class of User-Agents that also visit website links, parse HTML and generate a [non-interactive, representative] user experience”
And before this post, “link preview agent” had *zero* Duck Duck Go or relevant Google results for the actual phrase (just four in Google, two split by periods, and two adjacent text coincidences that are separated by page UI).
* https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=%22link%20preview%20agent%22
* https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=%22link%20preview%20agent%22
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