253775 - Provide interface to setting fz:quickMode in feeds.rdf

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, enhancement)

Description

[Colin Ogilvie [:cso]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040730 Firefox/0.9.1+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040730 Thunderbird/0.7+

Personally, I have no interest in viewing the pages that RSS feeds come from,
rather I just want to see the syndicated content. 

There should be an option to enable you to set the fz:quickMode property to
true, so that you can essentially say "Just show me the content in the RSS feed"
for a particular feed.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Actual Results:  
When I view a post in an RSS feed, it loads the page being called in the <link>
or <guid> element in the mail page, within an <iframe>

Expected Results:  
The content of the <description> tag to be shwon within the page within a <div>
rather than this, or at least an option to cause this behaviour.

Comment 1

[Scott MacGregor]

is fx:quickMode some sort of standard or did you just make that name up?

Comment 2

[Scott MacGregor]

maybe a checkbox on the feed properties dialog?

What would you call the text for this checkbox? "Quick Mode"? "Brief mode"?
Something that implies it's just the text?

Comment 3

[Colin Ogilvie [:cso]]

No, its in the feeds.rdf already - looks like it came from ForumZilla.

I would reckon just a checkbox on feed properties. The problem I was having with
coming up with a name is that this is how every other RSS client I've used
behaves by default, so I've had no idea what you would call it :( - Not that I
got much beyond managing to add a checkbox to the display, though.

Quick Mode? Brief Mode? Text-Only Mode? Simple Mode? "Show the contents of the
feed in the message"? "Redirect to the article/news item"?

The only thing I would add in addition to this, is that it would be nice if the
<guid>/<link> was also displayed in the output when in quickmode, but that
should perhaps be a new 'bug'.

Comment 4

[Scott MacGregor]

just asking out of ignorance then...

so in your experience most 3rd party feed readers always default to this quick
mode behavior, showing you just the text and nothing else? 

Comment 5

[Colin Ogilvie [:cso]]

Yep, of all the readers I've used, Thunderbird is the only one to direct me off
to the original site when going to read an article.

Comment 6

[Scott MacGregor]

actually I don't think the quickMode attribute is the problem. Nor do we need to
add anything to the UI.

Many feeds I subscribe to do use the inline content data and don't link to the
actual website posting. However, it looks like  the code from forumzilla for RSS
2.0 feeds doesn't try to read in the content:encoded data from the feed item.
Later on in the code, we detect that .content is empty so we fall back to
linking to the site.

If we make the RSS 2.0 feed parser properly fetch the content node then I think
this bug would go away...

Comment 7

[Colin Ogilvie [:cso]]

(In reply to comment #6)
> Many feeds I subscribe to do use the inline content data and don't link to the
> actual website posting. However, it looks like  the code from forumzilla for RSS
> 2.0 feeds doesn't try to read in the content:encoded data from the feed item.
> Later on in the code, we detect that .content is empty so we fall back to
> linking to the site.

Except... one of the sites I was having this issue with is an RSS 1.0 feed,
valid according to feedvalidator.org, and has a decscription field but no
content:encoded, yet still sends me off to the webpage in the link element
rather than displaying it inline. For some reason .content is only set if its in
a content:encoded field, whereas most feeds seem to put it in a description
field from experience, which is what other readers I've used use for displaying.

Comment 8

[Scott MacGregor]

Attachment: parse the content attribute for RSS 2.0 feeds

This patch came from Myk and makes it so we honor the content fields for RSS
2.0 feeds instead of reverting to linking to the web page in an iframe.

Comment 9

[Colin Ogilvie [:cso]]

That'd be fine, but the problem still occurs for feeds that are NOT RSS2
(Including 0.9 although thats parsed by RSS2's parsing) and also for feeds that
ARE RSS2 but use <description> -- particularly since the RSS2 spec that I can
find  (http://www.feedvalidator.org/docs/rss2.html) doesn't even mention
content:encoded.

Comment 10

[Scott MacGregor]

Attachment: add quick mode support to the UI

This patch does several things:

1) adds a checkbox to the RSS account manager panel which defines the default
behavior for new feeds

2) Adds a per feed checkbox to the feed properties dialog for toggling back and
forth.

3) For now,  I'm using the following test which is subject to change. I'm not
sure I'm happy with the wording:

"Show the article summary instead of loading the web page"

Comment 11

[Scott MacGregor]

fixed. Let me know what you think Colin. It's probably too late at night to make
it into the 08/07 builds so you may have to wait until Sunday.

Comment 12

[Colin Ogilvie [:cso]]

I downloaded one of the tinderbox builds (whichever one does Windows - I forget)
and it seemed to work perfectly. The only other thing I would love is the
ability to have a link to the Content-Base header (which has the URL) when in
Quick Mode, but I suspect thats another bug.

Cheers for fixing this, Scott.

Comment 13

[Scott MacGregor]

Umm when I'm in quick mode I see my new "Website" header in the message pane
which has the URL for easy clicking to load the web page :)

Comment 14

[Colin Ogilvie [:cso]]

So do I now I disabled the Mneheny extension - oops, thought I had done that
earlier.