262443 - Subscribing should autodiscover feed url from website url

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, enhancement)

Description

[Rimas Kudelis [use needinfo to ping]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040819 Firefox/0.9.1+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040819 Firefox/0.9.1+

It would be nice to be able to enter the website URL into "Feed URL" field, and
to have Thunderbird detect the correct RSS link automagically, when <link
rel="alternate" ..... > links are provided. And only if that fails, Thunderbird
should say that "it's not a valid RSS feed".

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
Run Thunderbird
choose "Manage Subscriptions", "Add"
and enter a URL of the website of which you know to provide an "alternate"
<link> element.

Actual Results:  
Thunderbird says, that "blabla is not a valid RSS feed"

Expected Results:  
Thunderbird should detect an "alternate" <link> element, and follow that.

Comment 1

[David Fraser]

This would make adding new feeds much easier - currently I have to "View Source"
from firefox, find the URL, copy it, and then paste it into Thunderbird

Comment 2

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

I'm not sure that using the link rel attributes is the right way to go here, as
I can see cases where someone might publish their RSS feeds to a folder that
doesn't contain an index.html with those meta-attributes.

The better way, I think, is the NetNewsWire/SharpReader approach which is to
follow this algorithm if given a URL instead of a URI:

1. Look for index.html, scan for <link rel="alternate"> elements, present list
of found RSS feeds to user (this code exists in Firefox already) who should be
allowed to select and subscribe to 1..n items in that list.

2. If no index.html found, scan for "usual suspect" RSS feed names: atom.xml,
index.xml, index.rdf. Again, present list of found RSS feeds to user who should
be allowed to select and subscribe to 1..n items in that list.

Comment 3

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

For extra points, instead of displaying the list as file names, display them
using the content of the <title /> element. :)

Comment 4

[Rimas Kudelis [use needinfo to ping]]

a target for <link rel="alternate" /> doesn't neceessarily has to reside in the
same folder as the whole site. You could enter "http://hostname.com/" in the
address bar, and  TB could actually add a "http://hostname.com/feeds/rss2/" as a
feed, if "http://hostname.com/" did provide an alternate link.

Comment 6

[Rimas Kudelis [use needinfo to ping]]

Reopening, as bug 262445 targets Firefox, not Tb.

Comment 8

[[e-mail]]

Also, I'd suggest eliminating the need for the protocol to be identified. If I type in cnn.com, that should just work. http://cnn.com/rss.xml (or whatever) shouldn't be necessary.

Comment 9

[John Hopkins (:jhopkins)]

I recently tried using Thunderbird RSS feeds and found that it is not user-friendly without feed auto-discovery: Some feeds work while others don't.  The error message does not help the user determine why that might be.
We should prioritize this feature for a future release.