Robert Sayre wrote:
In the subscribe dialog, I always know what the appropriate agent is. What makes you think "standards" dictate some other behavior?
Counter example: one that is all too common. If you get back something with a content type of text/html, what you are probably getting back is an error message with some useful information.
Other counter examples include some of the security holes that have been created by people serving executable content as text/plain (getting past some important security checks), and then getting executed by code that *thinks* it always knows what the appropriate behavior is.
Interoperability will be improved if we can nail down what are valid media types that atom feeds can be served with, and what are invalid media types that should always be rejected.
We can build voluntary conformance test suites for aggregator developers to test against.
The feedvalidator can provide feedback to content producers.
- Sam Ruby
