New filetypes

I’m developing an application for RISC OS for offline RSS reading (as a start) and I was wondering what to do when I save the file.
I would ideally like an RSS filetype, (I couldn’t find one when I looked. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place) so that any saved files will open an RSS reader.
Of course I could keep them as text files, and then drag them to the application.
Whats the consensus on this? and if it’s better in this case to have a new filetype how do I go about getting it registered.

See allocate

You too huh? ;-) Still, I’ve not worked on my RSS reader in a month of Sundays. I don’t use RSS so much any more, given Android has no default simple client (my Moto phone did and it was dead useful for updates on the stuff you actually look at!). Strange omission, but nevermind…

As Martin says, you’ll want to use !Allocate to define what your application is called, path variables, filetypes, etc.

When you get a filetype allocated, please let me know so I can use it too. No point claiming another for the same thing!

Will you be supporting straight RSS or RSS and Atom ? RSS is described at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html and Atom at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287 – they are both basically XML files with variations on how things are implemented. It shouldn’t be too problematic to design your parser to sniff which is which for knowing how to interpret the contents of the XML fields.

Martin: Thanks!
Rick: Initially I’ll just be supporting RSS, but adding atom.
The idea is to build up a library, I have a basic tcp/ip client that downloads via http. Now I’m working on an xml library, then rss and atom. The actual goal is to support jabber for gtalk and use native riscos stuff for it.
It’s for a mixture of fun and needs, I could use libxml and the jabber libraries but I don’t want to use GCC etc.
I have much much bigger plans, but I don’t have much time to actually do any work on it – more just time thinking about it driving to and from work :-(

There is already a RISC OS filetype for XML (&F80). I think previous RSS readers, such as Justin Fletcher’s effort circa 2003 (sadly no longer available), have used that.

For anyone that is interested in doing some testing. I’ve made some changes to the !Sargasso RSS feed reader.

It now works on armv7 hardware and runs a bit faster too.
The text is formatted a bit better. Quoted text is in italics and paragraphs are separated by a blank line.
It’s one of the few RISC OS applications that supports Unicode. Some characters weren’t getting translated properly previously.

I’ve fixed a few bugs and probably added a few too.

It can be downloaded from here.

Hi Chris, great to get RSS working again, excellent work! Seems totally stable for me (Pandaboard ES), have you thought about submitting it to !Store or !Packman?

Thanks. I use the GCCSDK autobuilder to build most things which generates packages automatically. Most get uploaded to riscos.info so will ultimately appear in !PackMan.

There is already a RISC OS filetype for XML (&F80). I think previous RSS readers, such as Justin Fletcher’s effort circa 2003 (sadly no longer available), have used that.

XML is not RSS.
RSS is an XML file, but if you double-click on an XML file, what is supposed to happen? Open in a feed reader? Open in an editor?

One could argue that later versions of HTML are practically XML (at least, when written correctly) which is something that likely formed from the XHTML spec – which is why we nowadays write stuff like <br /> and <img src...blahblah... /> (the important part being the / at the end, it “closes” the single tag).

So if there’s a vote for an RSS file being something other than XML, put my name to that. XML is too generic, it’s like “picture” (instead of JPEG, BMP, Sprite…).