Suggestion: Browser-based subscriptions

A conversation-starter for Team RSS -- a suggestion for browser-makers: Microsoft, Firefox, Safari, Opera, et al, on how to simplify the subscription process in a powerful way.

Scenario 

The user is viewing a page that contains one or more links to a feed that can be subscribed to. Suppose the user wishes to subscribe to one or more than one of those feeds. How can the browser make that as simple as possible?

Scope 

Various proposals have been made involving new file types, and url types. This suggestion is made without comment on those proposals. I use terminology that should be familiar to browser developers, without defining the terms.

Narrative 

When an HTML page indicates in its source that it can be subscribed to, a small white-on-orange XML icon appears in the browser chrome. When the user rolls the mouse over it, a tool-tip appears saying "Click on this icon to subscribe to the XML version of this page." No distinction is made between the various flavors of feeds (RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0, Atom, etc). If more than one feed is linked into the page, the tool tip says "Click on this icon to pull-down a menu of feeds you can subscribe to."

When the user clicks (the single-feed case) or chooses a menu item (the other case) a modal dialog appears saying: "Subscribe to the 'xxx' feed?" (Where xxx is the title of the feed, found by reading it.) Two choices. OK and Cancel.

If the user chooses to subscribe, the subscription list appears with the new feed highlighted. If the user cuts or clears the item, it is removed. Undo also works. In the right pane the content of the feed appears.

Feed discovery 

I suggest that browser developers go no further than to look for link elements with rel="alternate" in the head section of HTML documents. By using a single discovery method, browser developers can help the community simplify feed discovery.

Two examples:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.scripting.com/rss.xml" />

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Google Blog" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml" />

mySubscriptions.opml 

The browser-based subscription mechanism must work no matter if the user's aggregator is on the deskotp, or centralized, and it must work if the aggregator does not provide a toolbar that runs on the user's desktop, and it must work if the user has more than one aggregator.

To achieve these goals, please allow the user to specify a list of servers that are notified when the subscription list changes. When it changes the entire list is transmitted, in OPML.

Discuss