304426 - Impossible to add live bookmark for feeds with wrong mime type and XSLT-styled feeds

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

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

Description

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050811
Firefox/1.0+

Starting from the landing of bug 303848, adding a live bookmark is almost
impossible for some sites.

STR:
1. open http://www.haayal.co.il/
2. Click on the feed icon (in the url bar)

-> a download dialog.

I'm assuming it returns the wrong mimetype (I haven't checked). Still, we didn't
have this issue with the old live bookmark UI.

Comment 1

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Same happens with http://news.bbc.co.uk/
They style their feed themselves so feedview never sees it.

Comment 2

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Solutions would be good.

Comment 3

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

Note: the symptom in comment 1 is a bit different.

Comment 4

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Both are really that the feed displayed doesnt have a feed mimetype. Perhaps a
solution is to force feedview to display whatever page the live bookmark opens?

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Both are really that the feed displayed doesnt have a feed mimetype. Perhaps a
> solution is to force feedview to display whatever page the live bookmark opens?
> 

Overriding the xslt stuff the BBC does to their own feeds doesn't sound like a
solution to me. We should leave styled RSS/XML alone when viewed, I think (just
like we do not try and use xml prettyprint on it). So opening in feedview
*unless* it's already styled seems like a better idea to me.

Comment 6

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

*** Bug 304524 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

FYI, the Safari implementaion forces its feed reader.

Comment 8

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

The feed icon picks up feeds from link tags in the head. These are supposed to
be used to show a feed in a feed reader so I don't see what's wrong about us
forcing the feedview when we use that. If the BBC or anyone else want to display
their feed in a nice way in a browser then they should be providing a link
somewhere on the page to it that the user can navigate, which we wouldn't be
forcing. And indeed they do provide just such a link.

Comment 9

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Agreed.  Feed-provided stylesheets are a way to improve the user experience for
browsers that don't grok feeds.  Browsers that do are feed readers and should do
the same thing every non-browser feed reader does, namely style every feed the
same way to provide a consistent user experience.  For a feed reader, feeds are
just data; presentation is part of the feed reader's chrome.

Comment 10

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

and if I click that link in the page, should I act like a browser or a feed
reader?  If we're saying that feeds should always have our styling for a
consistent experience, fine, that's a choice.  I'm actually in favour of that,
and IE7 does the same thing.

As an alternative, we could use the bottom <browsermessage/> on feeds with
stylesheets.  i.e. This news feed can be added as a Live Bookmark, [Add Live
Bookmark].  This would only be in the case of styled feeds, which is a
relatively rare case as far as I can tell.

Comment 11

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

(In reply to comment #10)
> reader?  If we're saying that feeds should always have our styling for a
> consistent experience, fine, that's a choice.  I'm actually in favour of that,

And I think it's the right choice to be making, too. The entire point of RSS
pretty print is to take the XML markup and make it look nicer. I see stylesheets
like the one provided by the BBC to be a stopgap measure to make up for the fact
that most users of their web page get a face full of XML when they click the
pretty RSS links (which BBC is pushing pretty hard).

> stylesheets.  i.e. This news feed can be added as a Live Bookmark, [Add Live
> Bookmark].  This would only be in the case of styled feeds, which is a

I think we want to make the UI for adding feeds as Live Bookmarks as consistent
as possible, and am less comfortable with moving the button around depending on
whether or not the feeds are styled.

As mconnor points out, this is a pretty rare case; I only know of a couple of
places that do it, BBC being one of them. I think it's our role as the browsing
application to try and handle the content being served up, and feedview is our
way of handling this type of content.

Comment 12

[Jaime Mitchell (use [e-mail] for email)]

> > If we're saying that feeds should always have our styling for a
> > consistent experience, fine, that's a choice.  I'm actually in favour of that,

> And I think it's the right choice to be making, too. The entire point of RSS
> pretty print is to take the XML markup and make it look nicer. 

In order to give users access to the origional sites styling how about making
the "View - Page style" menu allow the user to switch between the site supplied
style sheet and the default pretty print, with the pretty print as the default.
This then gives users the option of accessing the site supplied styling.
(although this is probably rather OT for this bug)

Comment 13

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Feeds run through feedburner.com are all styled, so that's 87K, and Blogger's
Atom feeds are all styled, so that's several million, but that's still chump
change compared to what this bug was actually filed about, which is
application/rss+xml (which is not really a wrong mime type, and
application/atom+xml which is most certainly not a wrong mime type).

That makes it a dup of bug 256379 or bug 155730, but I don't see enough activity
there to make me think we don't need a workaround bug. Even if we pass on
handling direct clicks on links to application/(rss|atom)+xml, we still need to
have the button/menu show them pretty-printed so we get a link to add live bookmark.

Comment 14

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

(In reply to comment #12)
> In order to give users access to the origional sites styling how about making
> the "View - Page style" menu allow the user to switch between the site 

That makes sense to me. Default is our pretty print, but an entry for the XSLT
that is in the feed itself allows things like debugging of those stylesheets,
etc, etc, and isn't in the user's face.

Regarding Feedburner: I see what they're doing as exactly the same as BBC -
providing a good experience for the majority of the web that would otherwise not
be able to do anything with those "Feedburner" links and buttons that are
appearing everywhere. If we can do the right thing with the unstyled content (in
this case, present it pretty-like and with a quick button to bookmark it), then
I still think we should do that.

Comment 15

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Bug 304962 might be an alternate solution to this problem.

Comment 16

[Mike Schroepfer]

Ben,

Looks feedview related - can you take a look?

Comment 17

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

minusing, we're backing away from this feature now.

Comment 18

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

even with the back out of feedview, the RSS button at the follow BBC page does
nothing.

http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/americas/rss.xml#

Comment 19

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

woot, renominating :-/

Comment 20

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

actually, WFM.

Comment 21

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

(In reply to comment #18)

> http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/americas/rss.xml#

That's a direct link to the .xml file, which isn't handled by the Add Live
Bookmark function (it picks up feeds from link-rel tags). I think you want to
re-open bug 255637.

Comment 22

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

Feedview was backed out, we'll be going with a totally different implementation.
Hopefully this bug won't exist with that one! :)

Comment 23

[Tanner M. Young [:tmyoung]]

Resetting QA Contact to default.