Re: New URI scheme talk in RSS-land

> Your post seems to be offtopic. That there should be sophisticated mechanisms
>  to talk to syndication servers and retrieve metadata about a feed is definit
> ely an issue but it has nothing to do with this discussion. The problem is "H
> ow does a user go to a website such as http://news.yahoo.com or http://www.sl
> ashdot.com, who'd like to subscribe to information from these sites in a clie
> nt aggregator do so in a quick and painless manner?". The current process is 
> click on an icon that represents an RSS feed, copy the URL from the browser a
> ddress bar, fire up your RSS client and click on the subscribe dialog (if it 
> has one). End users would like to collapse this into one step (click link and
>  the right dialog pops up). 

Ah.  I get it.  This is just like the "Send To Printer" link on some
web pages, which saves me having to get out a peice of paper and a
pencil and write a lot of stuff down, or press Ctl-P, or something.
On MapQuest, the URL is "javascript:window.print()" which seems about
right.   Javascript is one of a couple ways to make browsers do
completely arbitrary and unpredictable (and very cool) things.

This kind of thing should be a POST and appear as a button, not a GET
and appear as underlined text (or however else users are used to safe
operations appearing).  How about it POSTs to the server saying "this
client wants to get your feed" and the server sends back some content
which, via javascript, 386 machine code [1], a new mime type or
whatever says "Sorry, I'm not going to bother keeping track of you and
sending it so you, but you can poll this address (________) as often
as you want, and see if it's changed."

     -- sandro
        
[1] I hope it's obvious enough where I'm being sarcastic and where I'm
    being serious here.

Received on Saturday, 6 December 2003 15:01:54 UTC