Subject: Is there a way to specify that a feed requires a login?

From: Aleks Totic <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 15:02:48 -0800

Hi,
is there a way for an Atom feed to specify that reading articles 
requires a login?

The reason why I've thought of this question is a problem in 
Thunderbird feed reader implementation. It tries to fetch & 
display full articles as HTML. For authenticated sites, if your 
login cookies are not there, you get back a login page. In 
Thunderbird there is no way to fill in the login page, as all 
browsing requests are redirected to Firefox.

One solution might be to allow browsing and cookies inside 
Thunderbird only for logging into feeds. To implement this, and 
show the login button only when needed, tb needs to know that 
feed requires web-style authentication. Is there a way to specify 
this in Atom?

Similar problem arises in feed agregators. For example, flickr 
feeds might differ depending on your login status (whether you 
are friends or family...)

I've grep'd through the drafts, and the mailing list digest, but 
I have not found any discussion of this issue.

Aleks

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From: "A. Pagaltzis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 05:20:06 +0100

Hi Aleks,

* Aleks Totic <[email-masked]> [2006-02-23 00:15]:
>For authenticated sites, if your login cookies are not there,
>you get back a login page. In Thunderbird there is no way to
>fill in the login page, as all browsing requests are redirected
>to Firefox.

I think the standard answer to that would be “use HTTP
authentication instead of cookies.” Many aggregators support
subscribing to HTTP-authenticated feeds. (I don’t know if most
do, but I assume so.) Then when generating returning a feed to a
client, weave the client’s supplied auth info into the alternate
links, and accept HTTP auth on those pages in addition to
cookies.

That would work out of the box. For cookie-based auth, there is
no existing approach, and I doubt that one would get significant
traction anytime soon.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>