- From: Mike Schinkel <w3c-lists@mikeschinkel.com>
- Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 16:15:35 -0400
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- CC: public-html@w3.org
Maciej Stachowiak wrote: > Browsers do show an icon for feeds in the UI, but, the XML icon on web > pages (which really should be an "RSS" or "Atom" or "Feed" icon) is an > <a href> link in the content. Wouldn't it have been better to just use > <a rel="feed"> instead of <link rel="alternate"> to discover feeds in > the first place? It is better when the site owner wants to include a visible link, but not when the site owner does not want to incorporate said link into the site owner otherwise feels is a nice clean visual design. As an answer to an unasked but potentially implied question, my preference is for an author to include both a <link> and when applicable an <a>. This empowers both crawlers and user agents, and for dynamically generated content can potentially be maintained in one place. > Then no one would have to wait for special UI in the browser to see > the feed links, Anyone with Greasemonkey and a script can expose that metadata. And that's my goal for T.oolicio.us; to make it possible for to see new metadata w/o requiring a browser revision or even people to have browser plug-ins. > and there would be no chance of an explicitly author-added link in the > visible page content getting out of sync a feed specified in the > <head> section. I don't think this a valid objection; i.e. don't allow it because authors might not maintain consistency. If consistency is a major concern, we really should deprecate a lot of existing HTML features and add in support for more indirection, i.e. the example to define macros for a collection of elements and/or multiple elements with the exact same attributes used (although, the macros *would* be nice...) I would instead prefer to launch a subgroup that would address how we can increase the percentage of valid HTML pages across the web. I have many ideas for how to improve validity, some of which I brought up on the WHATWG but they shot down my ideas as not being of interest and/or out-of-scope. > So this is actually a perfect example of why visible metadata is > better (and indeed HTML5 supports feed discovery on <a> elements, > belatedly solving htis problem). It may be better when applicable, but that better should not eliminate the prospect of useful where not applicable. -- -Mike Schinkel http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/ http://www.welldesignedurls.org http://atlanta-web.org - http://t.oolicio.us
Received on Thursday, 29 March 2007 20:16:03 UTC