Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Timothy Daniel Barber

Jyotirmaya Tripathi

Rayman Faruk Aeron

Masato Maeda

Benjamin M Schultz

Amber Tianqi Guo

Matthew James Wilson

Jong Gyu Lee

Julia Margaret Binger

Shanmugha Priya Satheesh

Hong Tao Chen

Ramesh Raman

To provide a hierarchical visual paradigm while maintaining the communication advantages of sibling extensions, a visual hierarchy simulation extension generates and maintains placeholders in a visually hierarchical manner, with the visual positioning of such placeholders informing the visual positioning of overlays of frames hosting the visual output of sibling extensions. Such a visual hierarchy simulation extension is utilized to layout and establish a desired visual hierarchy. One or more modules of computer-executable instructions are invoked to provide the relevant functionality, including the obtaining of the visual positioning of placeholders, the relevant visual translation between the visual positioning of placeholders and the visual overlaying of corresponding frames, the generation and movement of the corresponding frames, and the instantiation of extension content within the corresponding frames. The visual hierarchy simulation extension is hosted independently from the one or more modules.

Simulated visual hierarchy while facilitating cross-extension communication

To provide isolated extensibility for webpages, thereby enabling webpages to provide additional functionality supported by instructions whose execution is independent of execution of the instructions of the webpage, a unified manifest is utilized which comprises information regarding each of the extensions that can extend the functionality of the webpage, and a common extensibility platform script is invoked that provides the setup functionality to support such isolated extensibility. The extensibility platform script can be utilized by each extension thereby centralizing the relevant extension instantiation functionality. To provide for a unified manifest, a manifest associated with one extension can be copied into a manifest associated with another extension if the first extension indicates that it is capable of extending the second extension, or if the first extension is actually invoked by the second extension. Such a copy can occur when the extensions and their corresponding manifests are uploaded onto a server.

Providing isolated extensibility for webpages with a unified manifest and omni-accessible platform script

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Snohomish, WA, United States of America

Timothy Daniel Barber