303115 - Improve the sorting / searching / filtering of an RSS view (feedview)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: RSS Discovery and Preview, enhancement)

Description

[Steve Wardell]

With the recent landing of bug 302121, the RSS views now have a nice look to
them. To take this a step farther, we should add filtering / sorting / searching
to the view similar to Safari's view of feeds. I'll attach a screenshow showing
its UI.

Comment 1

[Steve Wardell]

Attachment: Safari screenshot showing their content management

Comment 2

[Erik Arvidsson]

Should the searching/filtering be limited to the information found in the page?

I got this working in a simple demo from a while back.
(http://erik.eae.net/playground/) I could reuse some of that code for this.

Comment 3

[Steve Wardell]

I'm thinking it would be limited to the information that would be visible to the
user if they were showing the full "Article length". Along with that should the
article length adjust when searched text is found adjust to show all matching
data? I guess what I'm trying to get at is trying to make the search find the
records from what the user has already downloaded in the feed data and make the
records that match the search obvious why they matched. The problem test case to
avoid is say you searched for "firefox" and that was the last word in the
content of the feed. So that word should be highlighted and visible to the user
as they scrolled up and down the feedview display.

The demo looks good. One item that Safari had that might be cool is several
predefined regions of time to limit the results displayed (All, Today, Last
Seven Days, This Month, Last Month).

Comment 4

[Erik Arvidsson]

Attachment: Work in progress

This one filters based on the "description" attribute set on the article div

Things that remain:

1. trim whitespace in the beginning?

2. Look in title as well

3. Hook up localized string. There should probably be "Search" string

4. Update css?

5. Animate? I have a pretty nice resize and fade animation for this but at the
moment it has some bugs that needs to be fixed before showing this


This does nothing to sorting. Maybe we should have an alternative bug for that?

Comment 5

[Erik Arvidsson]

Attachment: stupid CRLF diff fix

Sorry for the last patch, my dos diff does not handle line endings correctly so
I had to do some manual work and screwed it up

Comment 6

[Erik Arvidsson]

Attachment: Filtering without animation

This patch does everything in the list above except the animation

Comment 7

[Erik Arvidsson]

Attachment: Fixed a script error

I've still not managed to get cvs diff to ignore the invalid line endings in
the CVS repository. The patch still works even though it makes it hard to see
what actually changed.

Comment 8

[Erik Arvidsson]

Attachment: Second try

It is too late. If this one fails as well I'll try tomorrow night again

Comment 9

[Erik Arvidsson]

I've been thinking more about this and I believet this should be marked as
invalid since it overlaps with the inline search feature provided by default in
Firefox. Although this is a neat feature it does not provide any real value.

Comment 10

[Steve Wardell]

There are several possible improvements that we could choose from in this issue:

1) Searching - Adding a searching box would likely compete with existing page
searching and that I agree doesn't necessarily need to be added in an additional
implementation view of the same functionality
2) Filtering on a feed - Say you're looking at a feed on web browsers that has
like 50 articles and if you typed in firefox it would then only show the 10
articles that contained firefox in their title. This would be neat but can be
achieved by doing a search to find the articles
3) Sorting by date / title / source / new (these are the options Safari uses) -
This would be quite useful to provide an order to the results other than
chronological
4) Time filtering - The other possibility that Safari shows is showing all
articles, today's articles, yesterday, last 7 days, etc.

While these are only one possible list of items that could be implemented to
improve the sorting / searching / filtering, they do provide some good examples.
The addition of feedview greatly improved the viewing of RSS feeds, but adding
some additional actions to help users get what they want to see out of those
feeds would be another vast improvement.

Comment 11

[Erik Arvidsson]

Attachment: Screenshot showing filter by content and filter by date

The look and feel is a bit rough.

Remaining things:

1. Should it remember the date filter? Right now it is reset to All every time

2. The date filtering is not localized yet.

I'm still having issues with the file formats so I'll try to do the remaing
issues before attaching another patch.

Comment 12

[Steve Wardell]

Are there other thoughts on what's the maximum amount of improvement that can be
brought to the feedview view? I've provided some comments, largely based on how
Safari works, but would be interested to hear what others thing adds the most
value so we can maximize the effectiveness of this enhancement.

Comment 13

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

The feed reader has been demoted in recent versions of Firefox, and we're unlikely to extend or expand on it.