Feed Handling:User Interface

Background

The FeedView RSS pretty print extension has been checked in for Firefox 1.5. Numerous bugs have been pointed out in the feature however and the UI is not up to Firefox quality standards. All of this resulted in FeedView being backed out for 1.5 and targetted for the 2.0 release.

The main tracking bug for this feature is bug 302121.

What Is Needed

An audit and investigation of our existing RSS features and a UI that integrates them nicely.

Required Features

• Discoverable UI for showing and bookmarking feeds
• Ability to bookmark feed for easy use
• Attractive presentation of feeds when viewed in the browser
• RSS(all versions) and ATOM support

UI Design

When a page with an appropriate <link rel> tag is discovered, place this icon in the location bar:

When the icon is clicked, show a pretty print of the feed. If there is more than one *TYPE* of RSS feed, "pick the best format" and show that. If there are multiple links with the same format, assume there are multiple feeds (e.g. a blog feed vs. a comments feed) and show a menu, e.g.:

 [@v]
+----------------------------+
| Show News.com Feed         |
| Show Business Stories Feed |
| Show Security Stories Feed |
| Show Internet Fads Feed    |
+----------------------------+

The pretty print should be laid out like so:

+-------------------------------------------------------+
| FEED TITLE                                            |
+-------------------------------------------------------+
  
  [-] Entry Title ======================  [Expand All] 
                                          [Collapse All]
  entry text entry text entry text entry   
  entry text entry text entry text entry
  entry text entry text entry text entry  Add Live Bookmark:
  entry text entry text entry text entry  Name:
  entry text entry text entry text entry  [                ] <-- name, prefilled
  entry text entry text entry text entry  In:
  entry text entry ...                    [ Bookmarks Bar:^] <-- folder selector
                                                     ( Add )
  [-] Entry Title ======================

  entry text entry text entry text entry
  entry text entry text entry text entry
  entry text entry text entry text entry
  entry text entry ...

  [-] Entry Title ======================

  entry text entry text entry text entry
  entry text entry text entry text entry
  entry text entry ...

Problems With Current Implementation

With the status bar selector:

• Not discoverable
• No keyboard shortcut for creating a Live Bookmark
• Shows menu even when there's only one feed, or multiple formats to the same feed
• Defaults saving bookmark into Bookmarks list - Feeds are more constant use items, should default to saving into Bookmarks Toolbar folder
• Defaults bookmark title to be the "title" attribute of the <link rel> tag instead of the feed title

With the pretty print

• Excerpt length selector is useless (and flickers badly, even on capable hardware) - should just have a 'headings only' vs. 'headings+excerpts' view
• No easy way to add a bookmark other than the non-discoverable status bar icon
• Looks just like Safari but with different colors - does not feel firefox or mozilla-like: should engage visual design team to do a better style sheet
• various rendering errors (escaped HTML, <a hrefs>)

Recommendations

• move feed discovery icon into location bar, like the lock icon
• make the discovery icon intelligent and automatically pick the best feed from a variety of identical-feed-different-format choices
• make the discovery icon show the pretty print
• make link clicks on feed urls show the pretty print
• make the pretty print have an attractive, mozilla-like style
• ditch the length selector and replace with headings only vs. headings+excerpts
  • maybe use an "expand" vs "collapse" metaphor here instead, so "expand all" and "collapse all" with [+] / [-] buttons next to each feed
• add a prominent "bookmark feed" box that default bookmarks onto links toolbar with folder selector.
  • should use the feed title as the default name for the bookmark
• fix various rendering bugs in the pretty print
  • HTML escaped entities (bug 303206)
  • render HTML links and formatting (bug 302749)

TBD & Open Questions

• Should all bookmarked RSS/Atom files be treated as Live Bookmarks automatically?
• Should we consider the possibilty that there may be multiple feed types with different contents but the same filename?
• Have we talked about including a "what is this" type of thing on the right side next to the "Add Live Bookmark" section? IE7 does this, and I think it'd be good to make sure users know what exactly they are looking at.
• What will happen when the location bar is hidden by the user?
• What indication is available to notify that a page has some kind of feed(s)

User Comments

• There's one major flaw in Live Bookmarks, and that is the lack of notifications of new content in the feed. There should be a way of notifying you that the bookmarked feeds have new (unread) content both in the toolbar, and possibly via dowload-manager-like alerts (for bookmarks that are not visible on the toolbar).

• With the growing amount of blogs/feeds out there people end up adding lots of live feeds to their bookmarks toolbar, which reduces the amount of space for "real" bookmarks in the toolbar. Maybe (at some point in the future, or in FF3) there should be some kind of a different mechanism for managing live bookmarks/feeds/etc..?