- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 17:59:57 +0000 (UTC)
On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Mark Baker wrote: > > HTML 5 says; > > "If the alternate keyword is used with the type attribute set to the > value application/rss+xml or the value application/atom+xml, then the > user agent must treat the link as it would if it had the feed keyword > specified as well." > -- http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#link-type > > I believe this in error. It is intentional, as a way of grandfathering widespread legacy practice. I agree that it is suboptimal. I'm not sure how to cater to both the existing content and, moving forward, to allow Atom to be used with rel=alternate to mean "alternate representation that isn't a feed". > But it isn't a feed, and it isn't something you'd want syndication tools > to auto-discover as a feed, since that will just confuse users. Putting a real feed first would get around this, but you're right that in the case you described (and assuming no feed), there'd not really be a way to get around this other than simply not including the type="" attribute. > In addition, the media type on link is non-authoritative, meaning that > feed-semantics would be inferred before it was even ascertained that the > would-be representation was actually an Atom or RSS document. Yeah. I think the spec is clear that the real MIME type overrides it once the file has been fetched; but again, existing practice constrains what we can do here. In conclusion, I'm not sure we can do anything here. We're stuck between a rock and a hard place, as it were. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Wednesday, 29 November 2006 09:59:57 UTC