Comments on: XML View in Mozilla

By: Aral Balkan - Firefox 3’s feed subscription feature: convenience for the masses or a dangerous precedent?

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:39:28 +0000

[...] XML View in Mozilla The Firefox 3’s feed subscription feature: convenience for the masses or a dangerous precedent? article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License. [...]

By: Pretty Print RSS Feeds in Mozilla Again : Evil Genius Chronicles

Pretty Print RSS Feeds in Mozilla Again : Evil Genius Chronicles — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 01:42:19 +0000

[...] A while back, I railed about how Mozilla intercepts RSS feeds. Now some guy has created a web service that will inject some stuff into the RSS to make Mozilla treat it like XML again. I’ve tested this out and it works great. One thing to watch out for is that when you do this, your original URL is getting passed as a parameter to this CGI so if you are, like me, typically cutting and pasting it into something else, then you have something URL encoded that you have to fix. [...]

By: Garrick Van Buren

Garrick Van Buren — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 15:26:19 +0000

Well, unless that feed in question is managed by FeedBurner and the publisher enabled ‘browser-friendly’. Man that bugs me.

By: Garrick Van Buren

Garrick Van Buren — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 15:24:46 +0000

Camino presents the raw xml. It makes no attempt to parse it or send it to another reader.

By: dave

dave — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 17:36:09 +0000

Derek, thanks. That thread explained the whole thing to me, which says that I am far from alone in this belief.

Garrick, does Camino not do that? I know I have installed it at some point but I can’t remember the last time I used it.

Randy, like I posted in the update when I try to inspect the DOM of RSS feeds they show me the DOM of the rendered page with the Mozilla RSS icon and all. Maybe I’m not using it right, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that.

By: Randy Maugans

Randy Maugans — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 12:36:28 +0000

Dave-
I have a plugin installed in Firefox called XML Developer Toolbar by Scott Root (http://xmldeveloper.mozdev.org/). It allows you to switch from treeview to “pretty print” modes—I find this useful, as it allows you to view both formatted (if style info. is present) and unformatted XML. Also has some pretty cool tools, including node counting, DTD/schema generation, and validation, which transform FF into an XML editor.
Natively, I see nothing which controls this in the Mozilla browser itself.

Hope this helps!

Randy Maugans

Hope this helps,
Randy Maugans

By: Garrick Van Buren

Garrick Van Buren — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 04:26:57 +0000

I installed Camino just for this purpose.

By: Derek

Derek — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 02:43:07 +0000

I thought I was the only one who found this “feature” is utterly and completely frustrating because it cannot be turned off. The developers like it this way and don’t want to change it.

The only hack is to pad the xml file with 512 bytes of nonsense before you get to the rss tag. Here is a thread if you want to follow the “debate”: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/browse_thread/thread/146f70eaf0e1686f/f35c316db3883cf8