Media feeds scope

[chrisn]

The draft spec says that there can only be one media feed URL per-origin.

How would this work where a site has multiple apps on the same origin, carrying distinct content catalogs? For example, our website has iPlayer, Children's, News, Sport, etc., organised by URL path, and we would want to surface recommendations that are appropriate to each audience.

We suggest considering a more granular approach, e.g., something similar to the scope field in Web App Manifest.

[rektide]

I've been wishing that Web Notifications had, like Android, a concept of channels, such that the User Agent could have some finger grained control over notifications.

Seeing this issue makes me think of that desire. I don't think the existence of a media-feed "channel" would imply necessarily the presence of a notification "channel" but I think the idea of a channel, which could have an associate media feed and/or an associate notification stream, would be a potentially useful & coherent path forward to improving both media-feeds & notifications.

More scope please! Let's get some scope for some of these data-pushing systems!

[rektide]

Side note, created whatwg/notifications#154 to start talking about an Android Notification Channels like scoping for the web.

[beccahughes]

I think the solution here is to add support for ItemList to be included as a Media Feed item. That way a single feed can contain lists for different sub-feeds.

[plinss]

We discussed this during a TAG breakout today, and we share the concern about this being limited to one feed per origin. Aggregating all potential feeds from a site into a single feed with different sub-feeds will often not prove workable when different software is running at different paths.

[beccahughes]

Having one feed per origin confers some privacy advantages such as allowing the site to update the feed URL when the user changes or is logged out.

I think I have a solution that might work for both of us. We can use the title attribute as a form of scope. So in this model the user agent would support one feed per origin per scope and in the page it would look like this:

<link rel=media-feed src="url" title="News" />
<link rel=media-feed src="url" title="Sport" />

So in that example there are two feeds on that origin, one for news, one for sport. This would also work for us since it allows older browsers who do not support title to just use the last feed they saw on an origin.

[chrisn]

Sorry for the delay in responding.

My assumption from the original proposal in Discourse was that this feature would be used by installed progressive web apps (because of the use of a URL in Web App Manifest), hence my comment about scoping. I realise this was never stated explicitly and the design is no longer based on Web App Manifest.

I think your proposal could be workable, depending on the eventual UI and how the title string is presented and combined with the site name.

(As an aside, I think adding some description of the UI you're considering would be a helpful addition to the explainer.)

The use of the link title field seems awkward though, and presumably would require a change HTML to define this usage.