262798 - Atom/RSS feeds without <link href> elements show failed to load message

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Noam Tamim]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1

Gmail just added an atom feed to every account, that allows you to get a list of
new messages in your account (if you have a gmail account, add the above URL as
a live bookmark).
It works okay, but when I have no new messages (hence there are no links in the
feed), the loading of the feed fails, instead of showing some kind of an "empty"
item.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

Are you sure you gave the right address
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom
I'm not getting any feed there at all

Comment 2

[Noam Tamim]

in reply to comment #1:
I just clicked the link in your comment, and yes, it is the right address. But I
think you have to be logged on to your gmail account before.
Anyway, this link is shown on your inbox view - note the atom icon below the
labels list.

Comment 3

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> in reply to comment #1:
> I just clicked the link in your comment, and yes, it is the right address. But I
> think you have to be logged on to your gmail account before.
> Anyway, this link is shown on your inbox view - note the atom icon below the
> labels list.
I am logged in, but there's no link below labels.
So obviously this isn't implemented for all yet.

Comment 4

[Noam Tamim]

Attachment: an "empty" gmail atom feed

Since (as it seems from comment #3) the service is not public yet, I'm
attaching a testcase.

Comment 5

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

GMAIL offers RSS and if there is no new item it sends an empty feed

<feed version="0.3">
 <title>Gmail - Inbox for [e-mail]</title>
 <tagline>New messages in your Gmail Inbox</tagline>
 <link rel="alternate" href="http://gmail.google.com/gmail" type="text/html"/>
 <modified>2004-10-07T19:23:22Z</modified>
</feed>

the normal feed with a link looks like

<feed version="0.3">
 <title>Gmail - Inbox for [e-mail]</title>
 <tagline>New messages in your Gmail Inbox</tagline>
 <link rel="alternate" href="http://gmail.google.com/gmail" type="text/html"/>
 <modified>2004-10-07T19:18:42Z</modified>
 <entry>
  <title>[Bug 258189] Use new icons for Yahoo and eBay search</title>
  <summary>https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=258189
[e-mail] changed: What |Removed &hellip;</summary>
  <link rel="alternate" href="http://gmail.google.com/gmail" type="text/html"/>
  <modified>2004-10-07T19:15:54Z</modified>
  <issued>2004-10-07T19:15:54Z</issued>
  <id>tag:gmail.google.com,2004:00000000000000000000</id>
  <author>
   <name>bugzilla-daemon</name>
   <email>[e-mail]</email>
  </author>
 </entry>
</feed>

If a live bookmark does not contain any items it should display a message like
"no items available".

"Live bookmarks feed failed to load..." is a misleading message because you get
the same if e.g. you are disconnected from the internet.

Comment 6

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

We don't have a string for this, and its not a blocker at this stage.

Not that I know Atom, but if there's a title and an alternate link (in Gmail's
case the Inbox) we could just have that as a single link.  But I don't know how
non-scary it is to do this.  vlad?

Comment 7

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Attachment: an empty RSS 1.0 feed

We've got a perfectly good string, that we already use for RSS 1.0,
intentionally or not: with an empty rdf:Seq we display (Empty). That's a lot
less confusing for the usual uses of empty feeds than inserting a non-item-item
linked to the channel/link.

Comment 8

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Not blocking for sure; but the right thing to do in this case would be to just
not add any children to the live bookmark folder, and let it pick up the default
"Empty" item.

Comment 9

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Attachment: call empty rss and atom feeds empty

Failing to find items we can use isn't failure (in edge cases of RSS-like
things that aren't actually feeds, it could be failure, but that's
indistinguishable from a feed without useful items, and "(Empty)" is as true as
"Live bookmark failed to load" even then).

Comment 10

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Comment on attachment 200425 [details] [diff] [review]
call empty rss and atom feeds empty

I'm trying to think why picking up the (Empty) item would be bad, but I can't
think of a reason.  so r+.

Comment 11

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Trunk:
mozilla/browser/components/bookmarks/src/nsBookmarksFeedHandler.cpp;
new revision: 1.9;

Comment 12

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Should this land on the branch for b2?

Comment 13

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Comment on attachment 200425 [details] [diff] [review]
call empty rss and atom feeds empty

Ack ulp! I'd forgotten there was an unsynced gap before cross-commit that mattered again post-Places. Yes, I think we want it, and it's certainly baked long enough on the trunk to be quite safe.

Comment 14

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

mozilla/browser/components/bookmarks/src/nsBookmarksFeedHandler.cpp 	1.8.2.5

Comment 15

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change