Re: [syndication] Re: Autodiscovery (was: Fawcette's feed)

["Bill Kearney" <ml_yahoo@ideaspace.net>]

> For applications reading the autodiscovery link, the REL attribute is
> case-insensitive, so rel="Alternate" and even rel="aLtErNaTe" should be
> recognized as well.

Let's encourage them to use a constent format.  While case is, indeed
irrelevant, I'd encourage folks to use lowercase where possible.  If just to
make it look consistent.

> IMHO the title should not be required to be RSS but should describe the feed,
> for a site offering a single feed title="RSS" is acceptable, but when
> presenting multiple feeds it would help if the feedreader did not present a
> list of multiple items all with exactly the same title.

I disagree.  The title element is used within things like Mozilla in a drop-down
menu.  As such it's a big disruption to the user experience to start jamming
feed title info into it.   I'd go along with variations on this but only if
sites made a habit of keeping this text SHORT.  Note, other things make use of
the link tag and the title, so there's plenty of confusion that can be caused if
you used something another thing wanted.  Not to mention if someone tried being
clever and crammed markup in there.  I've no idea how well the various tools
would tolerate that, let alone accented characters or entities.

Yeah, it's a pain if more than one RSS feed exists.  Most have two (0.9x and
1.0).  The ones with more, well, there's where using OCS and a channel manifest
in an external file is a /fine/ idea.

The balancing act here is not tormenting users with too much jammed in a title
vs showing them multiple items all with the same name.  Tough call.

-Bill Kearney