1479038 - Consider linking to AMO (search page?) or SUMO doc about alternative feed readers from header of XML pretty printer if opened on a feed

Status: NEW

(Core :: XML, enhancement, P5)

Description

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Francesco Ariis from bug 1477667 comment #41)
> The "RSS/atom feed icon" is still present on many many sites in the "follow
> us" section.
> If a user clicks on it, the worst possible experience is getting a wall of
> unreadable XML ("Is the site broken? Is the browser broken?").

FWIW, this is presumably the same thing they get in other browsers...

> A simple message ("Hey, Firefox can't use this, but [there are
> add-ons](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=feed+reader)!)
> would go a long way in improving the UX, while hopefully adding very little
> code to maintain in Firefox.
> 
> Do you think this is possible?

So I think we could adjust the header at the top of the "unstyled XML document" pretty printer, if we wanted to do that.

I don't know how hard it is for the XML pretty printer to know it's invoked on RSS/Atom content. The RSS specs are "interesting" - perhaps it could just read document.contentType , assuming that's available when we load the web-component-ized pretty printer, assuming that's shipping "soon".

So I'm not sure if that's really something that we can do "easily" from an engineering perspective. If it is, I think this is reasonable assuming we can come up with something good to link to.


About that... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/extensions/feeds-news-blogging/ is not very RSS/Atom-centric so wouldn't help users much.

A search is tricky because AMO is localized, but not all add-on descriptions are. So if, say, we opened the Italian localized version of AMO, and we search for the Italian translation of "feed reader", I guess it won't find ones that don't have an Italian translation (of the add-on/description). If we search for the English "feed reader", I don't know if it'd find ones that do have an Italian translation. I guess the AMO folks could help with sorting this out.

As a fall-back we could link to the SUMO page covered by bug 1477674.

So yeah, if this is easy to do I'd take a patch. I want to be clear that I don't think fixing this bug should block going ahead with the removal, but I agree that if we can do this easily, that seems like a lightweight way to bootstrap people into using add-ons for their feeds.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

The pretty printer falls under Core::XML so moving this there.