Re: [syndication] locating syndication feeds

[Gary Teter <bigdog@bulldogbeach.com>]

on 7/11/01 10:58 AM, Morbus Iff at morbus@disobey.com wrote:

>>>> It might be nice to do something similar with the channel list: have it
>>>> predictable place relative to the current base href ("channellist.xml" in
>>>> the current directory), or if not found there, then at but also allow
>>>> a link rel meta tag to override and point the user-agent
>>>> 
>>> But my poor error logs!
>>> 
>> Think of it as evangelism.... I think the only reason anyone ever makes a
>> favicon for their site is because they got sick of seeing the errors! :-)
>> 
> If I may play devil's advocate, I think knowing what "icon" and "favorite" are
> much more accessible than knowing what "xml" and "rss" are. Some people are
> just plain dumb.

Hmm. Maybe I've been paying too much attention to RSS for too long.... I
always thought the favicon thing was pretty arcane.

Anyway I should probably clarify that I didn't mean that the user-agent
should ask for a "/channellist.xml" with every page request. The useragent
behavior I was envisioning was, If a page includes the <link rel>
explicitly, then enable/highlight a control which indicates to the user that
a feed is available. Otherwise, fetch the channellist.xml file only if the
user activates a "get the feed for this page" control.

Aaron wrote: 

> No, this isn't really a good idea, since you're telling other people how to
> organize their website. While you might want to make it a sort of convention,
> like /index.html, I'd be against anything official.

(I wasn't aware we were doing anything "official" on this list.... :-)
Putting a channellist.xml file at a predictable place (like robots.txt)
seems like it might better enable spidering for feeds (especially for
checking back to see if the channellist has changed). Plus that way you
don't have to change existing pages, but I suppose most people who are
generating feeds are doing it automatically, so the <link rel> approach
probably isn't too heavy-handed.

-- 
Gary Teter, Big Dog
Bulldog Beach Interactive http://www.bulldogbeach.com
It takes a hell of a lot of work to make it look this easy.