even though most people expect to find feeds made accessible in a browser's address bar, this method is still not used by all feed providers. and surprisingly, even though there were two attempts to standardize how this feed autodiscovery
should work (draft-ietf-atompub-autodiscovery which was replaced by draft-snell-atompub-autodiscovery), neither of these attempts was finalized as an RFC.
HTML5 defines a
relationship for the link element, but HTML5 probably is a long way from being finished, and does not retroactively define anything for earlier HTML versions. so it seems as if there currently is no standard for how to do feed autodiscovery; but of course there are many web pages (for example here, here, here, and here) describing the established method that seems to be well supported by most browsers.feed
since feed autodiscovery would be an important part of the way how feeds should be used on the web, i have added the expired draft to the Atom Landscape Overview, and i am curious to hear what the Atom community has to say about the current state of affairs.
[[ march 1, 2009: there is an active IETF draft for a link relation registry, which i missed when i wrote that post. ]]
The "feed" link relationship seems to have been taken out in recent drafts of HTML5. I suppose it's not a big deal, as HTML5 is the suck.
Posted by: Keith Bowes | Wednesday, October 05, 2011 at 12:08