consuming

From IndieWeb


How to consume various indieweb building-blocks:

Use cases for consuming feeds

  • reading posts from people I follow
  • "here's a microformats feed, mind the values for category x and property y" from Beeminder - Allows them to avoid writing OAuth integration with every provider's proprietary API

Barnaby Walters documented several personal feed consuming/processing itches in Web Dataflow Itches

Issues

Multiple feeds on one page

Itโ€™s fairly common [1] (examples needed) to have a feed page with one โ€œmainโ€ feed on, and then other auxiliary feeds, e.g. recent tweets

This forces feed readers and any other app which consumes feeds to present the user with a UI asking them to choose which feed to subscribe to.

  • As soon as this choice is made, the feed content no longer has a URL (requires extra non-URI state to be stored), complicating things for the feed reader and meaning that the user canโ€™t seamlessly move that feed to another reader (portability) or recommend it to others, as it has no URI.
  • โ€ฆ

Possible solution: give the h-feeds id attributes so they all have URLs

  • I donโ€™t like this much as it requires publishers to put poorly-understood attributes on all h-feeds, otherwise theyโ€™re useless. It also requires all microformats2 parsers to understand parsing from an ID element, which is not currently part of the spec. IDs are intangible โ€” users canโ€™t look at a HTML document and see what each ID means. URLs are tangible, itโ€™s obvious what they represent. --Waterpigs.co.uk 14:39, 21 October 2013 (PDT)

Previously discussed in #microformats on IRC, result of discussion was โ€œconsume first h-feed foundโ€ [2]