RE: New URI scheme talk in RSS-land

I've lost the train of thought here. What's the actual use case? What 
does this look like to the user? They press a button or follow a link 
that says "Subscribe to RSS Feed" and the browser launches a separate 
application to subscribe? Is this right?

If so, I think the new URI scheme is the wrong way to do this. It 
seems to me it ought to be done with POST rather than GET since it's 
unsafe, as has been mentioned before. Now given that it's done with 
POST is it possible to use an HTTP response code to indicate that the 
data should be subscribed to, or passed to a different application? I 
don't think there's an HTTP response code that really fits here, but 
perhaps one could be added? Additional information could be passed 
through the fields of the HTTP header. The downside of this is that 
it requires browsers to be updated to support the new code. However, 
this seems much more in keeping with the web architecture than 
inventing a new URI scheme just to hack around the behavior of 
current browsers.

I do think it's correct that a GET on an http URI should always 
display the content in the browser, assuming the browser speaks the 
appropriate MIME type. I don't think the browser should automatically 
defer all RSS documents to a different app.

-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@metalab.unc.edu
   Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA

Received on Saturday, 6 December 2003 14:33:42 UTC