104708 - Site Navigation toolbar: support for RSS links

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, enhancement)

Description

[Mark Nottingham]

There are bugs (e.g., 666054) regarding full-blown RSS support in Mozilla. It
would also be good to have a means of identifying when a page has a RSS feed
available, and passing the feed URI to their aggregator when they click a button
- whether their aggregator is integrated into Mozilla, another program on the
local machine, or a URI-addressable service.

This could be activated by:
  1) allowing the user to select an RSS aggregator (either on the local machine
or     on the network) in preferences.
  2) identifying RSS feeds through a LINK tag;
     <LINK rel="rss" href="http://www.example.com/feed.rss" title="My feed"/>
  3) when this LINK is encountered, populating a link in the site navigation toolbar
  4) when the link is activated, sending the URI to the selected aggregator.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Over to Tim

Comment 2

[Christopher Hoess (gone)]

Instead of adding this to the link toolbar, wouldn't it be better to make this automagically add to the RSS feeds available in the sidebar (with allowances for security/sanity checking?) Also, has any mechanism for locating RSS feeds ever been discussed on rss-dev?

Comment 3

[Mark Nottingham]

If the user wants to only use the sidebar, sure. However, they also might want
to use an aggregator on the network (so their view of the feeds is available
anywhere, not just on their computer), in which case this would be useful.

Also, it's good to have in the toolbar so that they're aware of the feed's
presence; one of the big problems in rss-land is feed discovery (right now, the
only way is a yahoo-like directory). Having a visual indication that a feed is
available, along with the other site metadata, is valuable.

re: discussion - yes, has been discussed extensively on the syndication list -
see http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/syndication/ and search for 'locating feeds'.

Comment 4

[Mark Nottingham]

Further thoughts;

- a better link might be alternate, as it seems to describe the functionality
well, and is already defined; e.g.,
  <link rel="alternate" type="text/rss+xml" title="RSS news feed"/>

This would require only two things in Mozilla;
  1. Mozilla would need to dispatch LINKs (or at least some LINKs) based
on the advisory content-type in the LINK, and feed that into the content-type
dispatch engine. 
  2. Also, this would require the ability to dispatch Content-Types to a URI as
well as a local program; e.g., in Preferences->Navigator->Helper Applications,
when you're editing a content-type, add to the 'Handled By' section something
that, with user input, would look like:
  [x] URI [http://aggregator.example.com/newFeed?uri=%s]
where %s is replaced by the URI in the link tag (uri-escaped, of course, and
maybe % isn't such a great escape to use here, but you get the idea...)

This would allow any LINKs to be passed to a handler that knows about them, or
alternatively to be displayed in mozilla, as is the case now. #1 above is
arguably optional; the motivation for it is that most RSS news feeds don't set
the proper content-type, and it's difficult for novice webmasters to do so.
Arguably, the status of the type attribute in link as 'advisory' allows you to
do this; the HTML spec puts discrepencies on the heads of the publishers, not
implementors.

Cheers
  

Comment 5

[Chris Croome]

There is a discussion going on about this on the syndication list -
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndication

I think something like would make sense for links to rss feeds:

<link rel="syndication"
  href="rss100headline.rdf" type="application/xml"
  title="RSS 1.0 Headlines" hreflang="en-gb" />

<link rel="alternate syndication"
 href="rss091headline.rdf" type="application/xml"
 title="RSS 0.91 Headlines" hreflang="en-gb" />

<link rel="alternate syndication"
  href="rss090headline.rdf" type="application/xml"
  title="RSS 0.9 Headlines" hreflang="en-gb" />
Also it seems that rel's are only supported for links in the head, should they
also be supported for links like this:

<a rel="syndication"
  href="rss100headline.rdf" type="application/xml"
    title="RSS 1.0 Headlines" hreflang="en-gb">Syndicate</a>

Comment 6

[Tim 'Tool-Man' Taylor]

> <link rel="syndication"
[snip]
> <link rel="alternate syndication"
[snip]

I agree with mnot that REL="alternate" plus a meaningful mimetype is the way to
go.  Much better to work within existing REL types than to create new ones when
possible.  If you do this, RSS LINKs will appear in the Site Navigation Toolbar
under "More -> Other Versions".  An RSS feed *is* an alternate version of the
current document and "Alternate" is a standard LINK type.  Perfect match.

I suspect REL="syndication" was inspired by REL="Stylesheet" and REL="Alternate
Stylesheet" for CSS.  In many ways, REL="Stylesheet" was a hack.

The link toolbar isn't the right place to put a special handler for RSS. 
Mozilla should be able to "do the right thing" with RSS documents whether they
get loaded by following a link in a page, bookmark, email, or in the link
toolbar.  Marking this bug WONTFIX.

Comment 7

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

mass-verifying WontFix bugs which haven't changed since 2001-12-31.

use the search string "BoletusEdulis" if you want to filter out this msg.