Feed Handling

Background

The feed handling capabilities of Firefox 1.x are limited to locating feeds advertised by sites in <link> tags and offering to add them as "Live Bookmarks". This is useful to some but not all, as there are many other specialized RSS aggregators, client applications and web services. These are not served by this UI. Also, clicking on links to feeds on web pages usually results in garbage (raw, unstyled XML) being displayed.

Goals

Make it easy to subscribe to sites so that users can receive updates to them in their favorite reader. Ensure that clicking on links to feeds shows something meaningful.

2.0 Requirements

• Feed Handling/Viewing Viewing
• Feed Handling/Subscribing Subscribing
• Feed Handling/Handlers Handlers
• Feed Handling/Configuration Configuration

Subscribe Button

A subscribe button appears in the navigation cluster when a feed is discovered attached to a page. Clicking the subscribe button subscribes the user to the feed in their selected feed reader. If no default feed reader is present, the user is shown a selection page. (See below). A right click on this button shows a menu that includes an "Open With..." link for choosing a handler other than the default.

Content Handling

When the user clicks on a link to a feed, instead of showing raw XML, a page is shown explaining that the user can subscribe to future updates to this site. They must select a reader and choose subscribe. Clicking Subscribe subscribes them in their reader of choice and takes them to the reader, or back to the page that they clicked on the link from.

This page is also displayed when the Subscribe Button is clicked and there is no default feed reader configured, or the user has selected to be asked every time before subscribing. In this condition, the page also displays a checkbox that indicates that the user must be asked how to handle the feed before subscribing.

The user is always asked how to proceed when a link is clicked on, or a feed URI entered in the location bar.

Optionally, the handling page may offer the ability to see some highlights from the feed (a "preview") but this should not dominate.

For the engineering discussion about how this feature is to be implemented, see Feed Handling:Pretty Printing

Web Service Registration

There needs to be a way for web sites to add themselves to the list of possible handlers. We should expose a method for allowing sites to register for specific content types. There are two actions - view and subscribe.

Preferences

Extend the existing download actions manager to contain a simple (default) UI for configuring the handling of some common types.

Bugs

This cluster of features is tracked in bugzilla through [bug 325081]

3.0 Features

Extend this UI model to all files for which an automated download action is not configured. Include an "Open With..." context menu item on all file links.

Links

• File Handling - long term overall architectural wishlist
• OBSOLETE Feed Handling:User Interface - User Interface design for proposed feature.