Re: New URI scheme talk in RSS-land

* Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> [2003-12-05 12:59-0800]
> 
> 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.

How about making sure the RSS feed URI appears in the mime-typed
representation passed by the browser?

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

Received on Saturday, 6 December 2003 06:47:08 UTC