User:Dria/On Web Feeds

This is just a scratchpad for some of my ideas about how Firefox could better handle Web Feeds/Live Bookmarks in the short term. Longer term development is a thornier issue and requires a lot of thought.

User interest in a page's updates

When a user encounters a webpage, there are a range of different levels of interest the user has in that page:

I don't care about this page. (no action)
I would like to find this page again. (basic bookmark/tagging)
I would like to be informed when this page is updated. (feeds from here on down)
I would like to be informed how many times it has been updated since I last visited.
I would like to be informed when this page is updated and have the title of the update sent to my browser.
I would like to be informed when this page is updated and have the title of the update sent to my browser and stored for later, offline use.
I would like to be informed when this page is updated and have a summary of the update sent to my browser.
I would like to be informed when this page is updated and have a summary of the update sent to my browser and stored for later, offline use.
I would like to be informed when this page is updated and have the full text of the update sent to my browser.
I would like to be informed when this page is updated and have the full text of the update sent to my browser and stored for later, offline use.
I would like to be informed when this page is updated and have the full content (all markup, images) of the update sent to my browser.
I would like to be informed when this page is updated and have the full content of the update sent to my browser and stored for later, offline use.
In addition to one of the above, I would like to have any enclosures associated with that update (photocasts, videocasts, podcasts) automatically retrieved by my browser and stored for later offline use.

Subscribing

Subscribing to feeds should be a one-click process, but more advanced options should be easily available (ie: rt-click on feed icon to bring up a dialog). It should also be clear if a user has already subscribed to a particular feed.

No feed available

Feed available

Feed available and subscribed (an ugly example)

Polling frequency

If users wish to be informed when a page is updated or new content is available, they will likely want to be notified at various frequencies per feed. Users should be able to specify how often each feed is automatically polled ranging from every minute to every 24 hrs. Alternately, they can specify that a feed should only be polled when requested, and the user initiates manual polling.

Update notifications

There are a number of ways users can be notified when a feed is updated, and users should be able to select which notification is used for each:

Menu-bar pop-up alert (ie: JS alerts)
Status-bar pop-up alert (ie: Joga alerts + see below)
Menu item update (see below)
Toolbar item update (see below)
Status-bar update
Sidebar/manager update (for that multipane feeling some people seem to love)

Managing feeds and feed content

Feed management

Feeds could be managed in the same "manager/organizer" as bookmarks. I talk about that more in my On Tagging ramblings a year or so ago.

Per-feed preferences

As part of feed management, users should be able to specify a "default" treatment for feeds (for one-click subscribing treatment), but should also be able to customize behaviour on a per-feed basis including:

Automatic polling frequency (1 min-24 hrs, or never)
Notification type (none, binary (updated/not-updated) pop-up (with title and/ or summary), menu item (binary or #) , toolbar item (binary or #), etc)
Content retrieval (none, title, summary, full text, full content, +enclosures)
Content archiving (keep for X hours/days, keep forever, etc)

These could be set through the Feed/Bookmark manager or through a dialog that is displayed when the Feed icon is rt-clicked (or something).

For example, rt-click the feed icon and get something like this (there's stuff missing, but you get the idea):

Feed content management

Feed content could be managed via the Download manager (for podcasts, videocasts, photocasts, full page content (incl markup, graphics) etc) if can make the download manager suck significantly less. Maybe rename it the "Web Content Manager" or something.

Feed text content (summaries, or full text content)...I'm not sure what we could do with that yet. Store it, of course, and maybe generate custom aggregate pages for offline viewing/scanning, or somesuch.