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

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

> 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.

Then, within our relatively small little world of RSS developers those programs
need to be FIXED.  It's actually a lot easier to do this than to rely upon vague
interpretations of the standard.  It's documented as case-insensitive in other
specs.

> 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".

Right.  Again, we're talking a 'best practice' here.  Since title="RSS" is a
short text and has meaning, it's a good fit.  It rapidly degrades, however, when
you start factoring in RSS, RSS-1.0, RDF, RSS excerpts, RSS content, RSS xhtml
body, RSS full feed, RSS full feed from category X on Joe Blow's Web site, ugh.
Plain old "RSS" here might not be the end-all-be-all of wonderful things but
it's a lot better than nothing or chaos.

> >  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
:-)

Not an assumption I'd want to live with.  Try an experiment, go stuff markup or
entities into a rollover for an A HREF and see what most browsers do with it.
Most don't handle it well, at least not cleanly.  Then there's punctuation
(quotes), also not handled well.  So you can imagine why I'm cautious about
being 'free wheeling' with the title attribute for this attribute's value..

But yeah, the specs 'allow' all sorts of things.  Let's try to avoid the trap of
being so ambiguous it's useless situation found in many specs these days.

-Bill Kearney