XML and RDF-head Edd Dumbill is clued in to something I’ve been wishing for a lot lately, and he’s got the tools and the smarts to make it happen.

He’s which written a scrap of code which pays attention to web page metadata and passes that information along to other applications that might find it useful. This is something I was wishing for when I wrote my GeoURL Bookmarklet, and which I’ve wished for again as I have recently been playing with FOAF again.

Unfortunately for me, he’s working with the Dashboard application which runs under GNOME and Mono. I guess I could run GNOME on my OS X machine, but I don’t think anyone has got Mono working on Mac yet.

Fortunately, for me, the idea is in the air, and there’s nothing fundamental to Dashboard, GNOME, or Mono which is going to prevent this kind of feature from being developed for the Macintosh. It’s just coming up with a good-enough framework and seeing just enough applications plug in to the “clue chain” (Dashboard’s term for the messaging path that applications can read and write to support this kind of functionality).