New URI scheme talk in RSS-land

RSS feeds are ordinary web resources and have ordinary URIs.  For 
example: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.rss is one, and as the 
scheme suggests, is typically fetched via HTTP and there's lots of 
scope for caching and all the usual helpful HTTP machinery.  However, 
there's a lot of talk in the RSS community recently about wanting a new 
URI scheme, e.g. feed://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.rss.  The reason 
is that they want to be able to click on one of these things and wake 
up the RSS client to read it and potentially subscribe.  You really 
can't do this with MIME types because the RSS client doesn't need the 
representation, it needs the URI.

Once you've got a new scheme, in popular operating systems it's 
straightforward to cause them to be handed to an app of your choice 
when clicked on.

In general it seems nuts to create a new scheme for URIs that describe 
ordinary HTTP-accessible web resources, but I don't see any other 
obviously-good solutions.

Cheers, Tim Bray  http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/

Received on Friday, 5 December 2003 16:08:07 UTC