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

[Klaus Johannes Rusch <KlausRusch@atmedia.net>]

Bill Kearney wrote:

> > 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.

The problem is that other documents, such as the W3C HTML standard, show the
rel="Alternate" with an initial caps, and already now some feedreaders don't
understand that format because the developers have based their implemention on the
examples, not a specification of the autodiscovery element.

> > 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.

I would agree that the title should be SHORT. I would even agree with a
recommendation to make it "RSS". I disagree that it should be required to be "RSS".
and feedreaders should only autodiscover a link  if the title is "RSS".

>  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.

Probably no worse than most tools handle non-ASCII characters in feeds today :-)

--
Klaus Johannes Rusch
KlausRusch@atmedia.net
http://www.atmedia.net/KlausRusch/