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
2. Live Bookmark support; Bug 287313

Out-of-scope for Camino

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