Content Indexing & Media Feeds

[rayankans]

There's some overlap between the Media Feeds API and Content Indexing.

The APIs seem to be solving different problems though. For one thing Content Indexing is more geared towards offline pages where the type can be hinted to the browsers, whereas Media Feeds is targeting video media with a more rigid type breakdown that varies from type-to-type.

I looked a bit into potentially merging the APIs, but there doesn't seem to be a nice way of doing that so that both the APIs' goals can be achieved. It also seems to me that this is a bit like CacheStorage and IndexedDb, which are somewhat similar, but both can simultaneously co-exist as they are different tools for different nails.

I'd like to get some further thoughts from people involved, since this is something that will likely come up in the standardization track.

@beccahughes - who's working on the Media Feeds API
@jeffposnick - who's aware about both APIs

[jeffposnick]

(This is a bit of a coincidence, because 9 years ago[!] I wrote https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/03/tag-your-tv-shows.html while a member of Google's Video Search DevRel team, and spent a decent amount of time working with video sitemaps and mRSS then.)

I've primarily found the Content Indexing API useful for adding non-media URLs, like article pages. In some cases, it's been a struggle to even come up with an image file to use as the thumbnail for an entry, and I've just used the favicon for the site.

In the future, especially as making web media content available offline becomes more common, we might have more web apps that attempt to index URLs that are effectively dedicated playback pages. But even at that point, I think the offline requirement means that running some local JavaScript in to figure out the current cache state is always going to be required for Content Indexing usage.

That's a different enough requirement than what's needed to create a media feed that I don't see the two APIs converging.