[Camino] Feed Detection & Handling

[Ben Goodger]

Hi folks,

Just wanted to let youu know that Feed Handling for Firefox 2 has been
checked in and turned on on the trunk and the 1.8 branch. I'm writing
because most of the code is not Firefox specific, and may be of
interest to any feed handling functionality you wish to add to Camino.
Specifically, it offers:

- an IE7 compatible feed sniffer, to detect any feed content
regardless of how incorrectly it was served (e.g. as text/html)
- a Feed Processor - a XPCOM js component that parses all different
types of feed formats
- a Feed Converter - a XPCOM js component/stream listener that handles
loading a preview page in the browser window when a feed is
encountered

We are going to be standardizing on this Feed Processor across various
feed usages in Firefox and Thunderbird: this preview page
functionality, Live Bookmarks, and Thunderbird News & Blogs. This will
allow us to have a common place to fix bugs, rather than several
different feed parsers as we have now ;-) It lives in
toolkit/components/feeds

The rest of the code lives in browser/components/feeds

Aside from the above, there is also the preview page itself and
options UI, which are Firefox specific but might be useful to look at.

It's probably worth playing around with this functionality in a recent
Minefield or branch nightly, there are some nice things, like the
ability to have a web service like bloglines etc automatically handle
links to feed content so that when you go to say news.com and click on
the XML icon you get taken straight to the landing page for that
service.

For reference, here is my post to dev.apps.firefox which talks about
the requirements of the Firefox system:
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/msg/f598759e5f5ddf5b

Anyway please let me know if you have any questions about any of this.
I hope something here is useful!

-Ben