Re: [syndication] Re: What to call the RSS file

[Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>]

Oh, boy. This is walking into a BIG issue that makes the RSS wars
look like a walk to kindy with mumsy (as my wife says). We're dealing
with similar things in SOAP.

Dispatching and versioning in XML, with the possibility of multiple
formats, namespaces and versions, is said to be too complex for the
internet media type (MIME) system. text/xml lets you know that you
should point an XML Parser at it, but what about beyond that? RFC3023
makes recommendations about further gradations of information (e.g.,
application/soap+xml), but it still isn't adequate for some things,
depending on who you talk to / are yelled at by.

At any rate, on the Web (which is where RSS is), filename extensions
aren't to have any meaning whatsoever - some people may make
assumptions based on them, but that's their problem; URIs are opaque.
There isn't and shouldn't be a standard extension for RSS, and 
all of these might be RSS:

  http://www.example.com/channel.rss
  http://www.example.com/channel.xml
  http://www.example.com/channel.rss.xml
  http://www.example.com/channel
  http://www.example.com/
  http://www.example.com/foo.bar

Certain brain-dead end-user systems might keep metadata in filename
extensions, but they shouldn't expect the Web to play along with that.

Cheers,



On Wed, Jun 13, 2001 at 02:38:39PM -0000, Bill Kearney wrote:
> --- In syndication@y..., Aaron Swartz <aswartz@s...> wrote:
> > Ben Parker <ben@a...> wrote:
> > 
> > > Is there a convention or a Good Way to name the RRS file? It 
> seems there are
> > > every kind out there, including backend.php, rss.xml, xml.rss 
> foo.txt etc
> > > etc. I suppose it doesn't matter, but just in case it does...
> > 
> > It doesn't really matter, although I tend to prefer rss.xml for 
> 0.91 and
> > rss.rdf for 1.0.
> 
> Technically, it does matter.  Some systems might expect to use that 
> file extension as a means to determine how to deal with the file.  
> Yes, in an ideal world an .XML suffixed file should be understood by 
> the UI as something to be 'parsed' in order to determine the correct 
> way to handle it.  Unfortunately we don't yet have that situation.  
> While it's true that most feeds aren't going to be handled by the 
> filesystem UI, that's no reason not to make them capable of it.
> 
> Is there a web accessible database of 'well known' file extensions? 
> Let's not pick something already taken by someone with an axe to 
> grind...
> 
> -Bill Kearney
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
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> 
> 

-- 
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/