Hyatt Ponders RSSafari
Posted January 26th, 2003 @ 11:12pm by Erik J. Barzeski
David Hyatt, former Mozilla/Chimera über-nurb and current Safari nurb-extraordinaire, ponders the merging of RSS aggregators and browsers. It's awesome that David - in public view no less - is considering these things. And to you tabbed browsing fans, David gives you some hope, saying "tabs provide one with a means of efficiently handling a lot of information."
My own personal take: rss:// should be a protocol. NNW should grab an RSS link and add the subscription. Simple as that. It happens when I click an rtsp: (QuickTime) link. It happens when I click an aim: (AIM) link. It certainly happens when I click mailto: ftp: http: https: and others. It used to happen when I clicked gopher: links too :-).
P.S. I think it's funny that David says "news" when he really means RSS or something like that - news, after all, has its own protocol: NNTP. C'mon now David, I'd hardly call this site news! Heh heh.
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Posted 27 Jan 2003 at 12:03am #
Why should RSS get its own protocol, unless you want to write a new protocol to handle transfering of RSS HTTP works perfectly fine.
Posted 27 Jan 2003 at 12:46am #
I have to agree with James. RSS is just a file with yet another content-type, just like a PDF or an MPG or an MP3 -- doesn't need its own protocol, since it comes over http.
Posted 27 Jan 2003 at 5:54am #
It isn't a protocol but a URL scheme and you are not the first person who thought of it 🙂
From NSLog [1]
My own personal take: rss:// should be a protocol. NNW should grab an RSS link and add the subscription. Simple as that. It happens when I click an rtsp: (QuickTime) link. It happens when I click an aim: (AIM) link. It certainly happens when I click mailto: ftp: http: https: and others. It used to happen when I clicked gopher: links too :-).
In an older NewsMonster attempt at an aggregator in 100% JavaScript under
Mozilla (it was called Bonita) I wrote a view-rss: protocol adapter for Mozilla.
It did exactly this. You put a URL such as
view-rss:http://www.peerfear.org/rss/
And then you could view it, subscribe to it, etc.
It could also handle the application/rss+xml media type correctly.
Expect this code to be merged into a future version of NewsMonster.
Posted 27 Jan 2003 at 7:14am #
oh dear lord. the thought of nnw *fully* embeded in safari (or any browser) makes me sick.
Posted 27 Jan 2003 at 9:56am #
I would have thougth this would be best handled by Sherlock, both editing and updating
Posted 27 Jan 2003 at 10:01am #
I'm using the term "protocol" loosely here. rss: could be the same protocol underneath as HTTP (which it currently uses), but browsers could be built to understand that links with "rss://" should be passed to an RSS aggregator. That's all I meant. I should have written that more clearly.
Posted 27 Jan 2003 at 5:48pm #
a URL scheme is good, I like those. I hate when the URL scheme takes the form of a protocol scheme, like Apple did with iCal, webcal:// and remotely mounting a disk image, disk://.
My "browser" would understand the URL scheme rss: and do "smart" finding of the RSS feed by checking first to see if it is an rss file then checking the META tag in the file if option one fails, then falling back to common urls like /index.rdf and /index.xml.