AT this time, the extension "ShowHideContent" is based on pulling the content from full web page of the thread. This mean that I need to pull the entire code of the page including all the JavaScript code and style code which are not needed for this extension. Next I need to parse the content in order to get what we actually want to present.
This approach have 2 main issues: (1) We have to send many requests to the server and collect a lot of unnecessary information. In doing so, we cause the server to waste unnecessary resources. (2) We spend a lot of time on examine the DOM structure of the document, and on parsing the information.
There is a built-in API for RSS, which could be useful, if it was well design with useful information. Unfortunately, at this time we have three RSS we can use (as much as I know):
(1) getting the information for specific category about the original message in the thread (only the question without the comments and answers). I like this one and it is useful. I might use it in the future, but it is not helping for our needs in this extension.
(2) getting only the answers for specific thread. This one is totally useless in my opinion as I thin that the separation between "answers" and "comments" make no sense in discussion forums! Moreover, as a result of limitation in the QnA system (for example the length of the comments) many people like myself use the "answer" option in order to send a comment. This is a different discussion and a really big iussue since it break the discussion totally. The answers are not presented in the discussion hierarchy but like a separate discussion.
(3) getting the answers and the comments for specific thread. Again, this is useless since the for some reason it does not include the original question. This means that I need to JOIN information between sources which make it really problematic (unless I will download all to a tabular structure (or database) and start executing JOIN queries.
Therefore, at this time I pull the data duirectly from the HTML page instead of using simple solution based on the RSS API
This is done out of necessity and out of the tools at our disposal
I hope that Microsoft team will improve the RSS and make it useful. Once it will be done then I will change the extension to pull the data from the RSS.
AT this time, the extension "ShowHideContent" is based on pulling the content from full web page of the thread. This mean that I need to pull the entire code of the page including all the JavaScript code and style code which are not needed for this extension. Next I need to parse the content in order to get what we actually want to present.
This approach have 2 main issues: (1) We have to send many requests to the server and collect a lot of unnecessary information. In doing so, we cause the server to waste unnecessary resources. (2) We spend a lot of time on examine the DOM structure of the document, and on parsing the information.
There is a built-in API for RSS, which could be useful, if it was well design with useful information. Unfortunately, at this time we have three RSS we can use (as much as I know):
(1) getting the information for specific category about the original message in the thread (only the question without the comments and answers). I like this one and it is useful. I might use it in the future, but it is not helping for our needs in this extension.
For example: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/feed/13/topic.rss
(2) getting only the answers for specific thread. This one is totally useless in my opinion as I thin that the separation between "answers" and "comments" make no sense in discussion forums! Moreover, as a result of limitation in the QnA system (for example the length of the comments) many people like myself use the "answer" option in order to send a comment. This is a different discussion and a really big iussue since it break the discussion totally. The answers are not presented in the discussion hierarchy but like a separate discussion.
For example: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/feed/38145/answers.rss
(3) getting the answers and the comments for specific thread. Again, this is useless since the for some reason it does not include the original question. This means that I need to JOIN information between sources which make it really problematic (unless I will download all to a tabular structure (or database) and start executing JOIN queries.
For example: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/feed/38145/comments-and-answers.rss
Therefore, at this time I pull the data duirectly from the HTML page instead of using simple solution based on the RSS API
This is done out of necessity and out of the tools at our disposal
I hope that Microsoft team will improve the RSS and make it useful. Once it will be done then I will change the extension to pull the data from the RSS.