Don’t use the ‘feed’ URI Scheme
Friday, 15 July 2005
It’s been covered before elsewhere, but just a friendly reminder: ‘feed’ URIs are bad for the Web, as are any that are used solely for dispatch (e.g., ‘itms’, ‘ pcast’).
I’m looking at you, Apple.
Interestingly, Apple also supports doing Web dispatch the right way; with media types. I know this because going to my test page — a zero-length file with a generic extension, but a ‘application/atom+xml’ media type — gets dispatched to my RSS reader in Safari on Tiger.
They also do content sniffing (the wrong way, but not so hideously evil and intrusive as creating a whole new URI scheme), because feeds that are served as text/plain ( for example) seem to get dispatched pretty reliably too.
So, why the new URI scheme? Complete cluelessness? A Pyrrhic plan to devalue the Web? What is it, Steve?