294715 - Links with feed:// protocol are not detected by Firefox as RSS/Atom feeds

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 333751

(Firefox :: File Handling, enhancement)

Description

[Randy Peterman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050509 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050509 Firefox/1.0.4

there is a new protocol bein promoted with the URL structure of
feed://www.urltofeed.com/rss.xml
This structure allows feed aggregators to identify a feed URL without some of
the hassle that is currently a problem (XML files are not always known to be RSS
files on the web)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Click on any of the feed:// links to see Firefox not recognize the feed or the
protocol
Actual Results:  
Because I have FeedDemon installed it has registered on Windows that it is the
handle for such a protocol.  However, Firefox does not do this by default.

Expected Results:  
It should have asked if I wanted to add the RSS feed to my bookmarks.

This is surely a wishlist item, however, it may be easy to implement for 1.05 or 1.1

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Further reading:

The "spec": http://www.25hoursaday.com/draft-obasanjo-feed-URI-scheme-02.html
(yeah, it's a "pre-draft" that claims to have expired last June - it's RSS,
that's how we do things)

The section in WebArch that says "do not do this":
http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#pr-reuse-uri-schemes

feed:'ll never be registered, because it's a scheme that should be a mime type
(or two or three), but the mime type will also never be registered, because
application/rss+xml would need to refer to somewhere between seven and eleven
different incompatible formats. It's an ugly hack, but doing it in the browser
at least eliminates one of the biggest objections (for our users, not for anyone
else's), that using a scheme when you should use a mime type leaves people
without a handler just looking at "foo: is not a registered protocol" with
nowhere else to go. Once people start using it anyway (the default WordPress
template includes a feed: link, so that's half a million at least), we're
probably better off just handling them.

However, I disagree with comment 0's Actual/Expected: with another handler
registered, we shouldn't touch them. feed: isn't supposed to replace
autodiscovery, which we've already grabbed, just supplement it, and anyone with
a another registered handler should only be clicking on feed: links because they
want the URL to hand to their external handler. Whether we register with the OS
as a handler, but only when there isn't one already, or we only handle them
internally when we can't find an external handler, it's not something we want to
take away from anyone else.

Comment 2

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Implemented in bug 333751

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 333751 ***