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Re: [syndication] shared feed lists
> > Why is using a <head> section <link> tag not sufficient?
>
> It doesn't seem to make sense to force someone to pull a file that they
> may or may not want (and may or may not exist) in order to find out
> where something, possibly completely unrelated, lives.
What's unrelated about it? They're probably already pulling the web page. Why
not give them a <link> tag that has a specific type attribute telling them "This
is the Feed list URL"?
> I don't mind using that approach when related HTML exists, but as it
> relates to my implementation, it doesn't always exist and I don't see a
> clearcut reason why we should force it to exist.
It seems far more likely that yours is the edge case. Feeds without a web page?
I could see why someone might create such a thing but in my experience (with
Syndic8) it's not happening in any great quantity.
Here's the thing, you can put a <link> tag in the HTML pages and if anything,
looking at any of your HTML pages looks at it they'll be able to make a
successful request right to the correct document. No error log entries. That
and assistive tools like browser bookmarkets can quite easily pick up on it and
use it while already having downloaded the HTML page. Extending them to do
'favicon.ico' hacks is actually a fair bit more difficult.
Then there's the situation of a hosting provider that has many users, should the
root of the site be /required/ to use this index? Forcing them to use a fixed
filename would needlessly require them to write the static file. Either that or
cobble up rewriting solutions. Again, to what valued end? This as opposed to
suggesting an agreed upon <link> tag type and their option of what sort of URL
to use. No restrictions against using dynamic scripts and no harder-than-needed
server alias or rewriting rules.
> On the other hand, we're doing exactly what this proposes to solve for
> using OCS and a predictable file location. Happy to extend the discovery
> mechanism (easy) but not too crazy about having to take another format
> into consideration on behalf of my users.
>
> Why isn't OCS "good enough" to do this?
I agree OCS has already been doing this for well over two years. Yet Winer
seems hell bent on reinventing things. That and it seems he's painted himself
into a corner far too many times to ever let his ego back down from his hatred
of the GOOD ideas that RDF offers. It seems like he'd rather punish everyone
than ever take the risk of admitting that what others have done is worth using.
-Bill Kearney