Re: Feed icon

[Osma Ahvenlampi <oa iki fi>]

On Tue, 2005-12-20 at 08:01 -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
> Definitely should do it. That said, see:
> http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/12/18/Orange
> for why this is only a partial solution.

Well, actually Tim Bray updated that entry to clear up a
misunderstanding, which invalidates most of the critique against that
icon. The remaining question really is: what should a browser do when
the icon is clicked?

Firefox sets up a "Live bookmark". I don't know what IE7 is going to do,
but your link to Robert Scoble asks some of the right questions. I think
that for most purposes, a standalone RSS reader like Straw is actually
the wrong choice - but it does have one use, that of downloading feeds
to a standalone non-networked device (and in that function, it should
support blogs of all kinds, ie podcasts etc). For an online browser,
Firefox isn't too far off the mark, I think.

As it happens, I stuck this into Bugzilla already,
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324511

> [See also: http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2005/12/18/tom-biro-wonders-when-rss-is-really-gonna-get-simple/
> where Scoble notes that the IE team is working on this problem. It
> would be very cool if we beat them to it.]

So, if RSS feed support was built into the browser itself, and it was in
the form of Live Bookmarks, it would not necessarily have to poll each
feed at the same frequency -- the poll might be initiated by the user
clicking the live bookmark (or feed). But that would not be fast enough
for the frequently visited feeds, nor would it help synchronising them
for offline use.

For that, Epiphany could either have built-in support, or cooperate with
another application through D-Bus to notice which feeds are frequently
visited, and schedule sync events in proportion. The transfer to a
handheld device is clearly another app's domain, but why download the
feed twice when it could be downloaded into/through Ephy's cache?

-- 
Osma Ahvenlampi   <oa iki fi>    http://www.fishpool.org