phil ringnalda

Don Box touts himself, Sam, and Clemens as being “probably the only three live CDF feeds on the net”, and claims that “CDF is still supported in IE (including Longhorn!) and has been stable…”.

Well, in fact it’s Clemens’ tool, dasBlog, that’s providing his feed, and googling “cdf ashx” seems to say there’s a couple hundred live CDF feeds around. However, the state of CDF support has shockingly declined: I click a link to a CDF file in Firefox, it asks what to do with it, offering the default of opening it with “ChannelFile”, but when I do that, and IE’s Favorites manager opens, lets me save it as a bookmark, and then opens IE with the bookmarks open in the sidebar, ready for me to browse items from the channel, I find that if I click another CDF link in Firefox, it adds another IE bookmark folder, but the items in the first one are overwritten by the items from the second. This sort of sloppy handling of an old, nearly abandoned format simply can’t be tolerated! (Unless it because of something Firefox is doing, in which case it’s all Windows’ fault).

It’s been said a few times before, but it bears repeating: in a lot of ways, CDF rocks. If there was a cross-browser implementation, with auto-updating bookmarks that would let me easily navigate through the unread things, and if everyone had nice clean lightweight individual entry archive pages, I’d give up a separate aggregator in a second. Cross-browser, easy navigation, and a spec with a few less typos, and that’s all I want.