Note RSS feed contains too much information and too many timestamps

[simon04]

Reading a feed of notes (/api/0.6/notes/feed?bbox=) on mobile or text-based readers is confusing (screenshot from Owncloud News):

This is due to:

• too many relative timestamps being displayed (the note was resolved 3 minutes ago an hour ago) – indicated in red
• since often <div> elements are discarded, the most relevant information, i.e., the comment, is hard to spot – indicated in green
• some part of the information is duplicated – indicated in blue
• furthermore, depending on the RSS generation, the full note might display newer comments than the current one

I propose to largely simplify the text content:

• either to only contain the comment (e.g., show c3 for a note with comments c1, c2, c3, c4)
• or contain all note comments up to the current one in reversed order (e.g., show c3, c2, c1 for a note with comments c1, c2, c3, c4)

For the former, the implementation is as short as (plus some additional clean up)

diff --git a/app/views/notes/feed.rss.builder b/app/views/notes/feed.rss.builder
index e663d94..ef85064 100644
--- a/app/views/notes/feed.rss.builder
+++ b/app/views/notes/feed.rss.builder
@@ -18,9 +18,7 @@ xml.rss("version" => "2.0",
         xml.link url_for(:controller => "browse", :action => "note", :id => comment.note.id, :anchor => "c#{comment.id}", :only_path => false)
         xml.guid url_for(:controller => "browse", :action => "note", :id => comment.note.id, :anchor => "c#{comment.id}", :only_path => false)

-        xml.description do
-          xml.cdata! render(:partial => "entry", :object => comment, :formats => [ :html ])
-        end
+        xml.description comment.body

         if comment.author
           xml.dc :creator, comment.author.display_name

[tomhughes]

That is supposed to be a feed of changes, so is primarily driven by recent comments and those are, as you say, the principle information.

Unfortunately a comment on it's own may not be very meaningful, which is why the rest of the note is then shown.

I'm not sure why a feed reader would throw away a div - in my experience they will render pretty much whatever HTML you throw at them within reason.

[simon04]

I agree that the context might be helpful – that would speak for my second proposal.

Trac however shows only the new comment on ticket updates (e.g., https://josm.openstreetmap.de/timeline?format=rss&ticket=on&ticket_details=on).

I also tested newsbeuter which nicely displays <ol>/<ul> lists, but discards <div>s. :smile: