User:Sardisson/Thoughts on Feeds

Feed Handling and Camino

kreeger, philor, and I were discussing this one night on irc; Mano and I discussed things again another night. Below is a summary of some of the discussion and my thoughts about what is in-scope for Camino, what's questionable, and what Camino will never do, as well as some thoughts on timetables.

In-scope for Camino

1. Autodiscovery of any feeds in <link> tags and ability to pass detected feeds off to the user's desktop reader of choice; Bug 316232, Camino 1.1
   • Allow user to select reader of choice (Safari is default on 10.3.9 and above, no OS UI for changing)
2. Sniffing - handling of user click on <a href> links that are feeds; ideally for Camino 1.1
   • Right now Camino xml pretty-prints these, if they're served with a valid content-type
   • Otherwise it attempts to render them, download them, or whatever, depending on the invalid content-type
   • Instead, these should instead be passed to the user's reader of choice
3. Allowing cases 1 and 2 to be passed to a web-based reader; ideally for Camino 1.1

Questionable for Camino

1. Preview of feed before subscription
   • Mano: preview of feeds could be coppied over from ff easily though
   • ardissone: i'm not sure we want to go that far
   • Mano: assuming there're no issues with implementing XPCOM components in JS in camino...
   • Mano: pIE7, pFF2 and pSafari should be in mind here.
   • Mano: once IE7 ships, web authors are going to assume your browser does provide this functionallity
   • Mano: ("Click on this link to see this as a feed." etc)
   • ardissone: i don't see that as integral to anything unless your browser is a reader
   • Mano: this is the right thing imo from the user POV (esp. the "Use a web site" stuff)

   ...

   • Mano: the thing is, you don't really know if you want to open this feed without a preview
   • ardissone: that's a valid point, although if desktop readers provide that feature before subscribing, we should let them do that (i don't know if they do)
   • Mano: even if some do, leaving the browser session just to see if you want to subscribe to this feed is disturbing. imho.
   • ardissone: i could see that. at that point, though, the browser is basically a full-fledged reader and it's crossed pink's line in the sand
   • ...
   • philor: the preview->reader slipperly slope is a brutal one
   • philor: things I usually need from a feed preview are "how much content is there?" (so you have to show content, and show all of it, not just your own excerpting), and "does it include HTML and links, or strip it's own HTML?" (so you have chrome-content mixing and escaping troubles)
   • ...
   • froodian: for feed preview, can't we just leave a way to xml pretty-print?
   • froodian: which will be an effective preview without sliding into "reader" zone
   • ardissone: we could—and we probably need to in any case, in case the feed sniffer is overzealous or whatever; some people will want to see the raw xml—but that doesn't really accomplish anything for normal people
   • ardissone: it's the same reason we didn't tout xml pretty-print as a feature in Camino 1.0; for normal people, xml pretty-print is no more useful/no less Greek than raw xml
   • froodian: thinks all feed should be feedburner (which gives you a preview that they make when you follow the link)
2. Live Bookmark support; Bug 287313

Out-of-scope for Camino

1. Full-fledged feed reader/manager; Bug 287705