<link rel="link" type=????/>

Bob Wyman Tue, 22 Feb 2005 11:43:58 -0800

At PubSub, we allow users to subscribe to RSS/Atom entries that contain user-specified URIs. (Using a query like: URI:nytimes.com) Users of this feature have often asked us to augment the entries we publish by attaching the URIs we discover to the entries. The idea has been to make it easier for people to build applications that exploit these links and to avoid forcing clients to parse the full source entries.

So, we’ve started adding these “links to URIs” to the entries we publish on an experimental basis. In order to keep things as simple as possible, what we’ve done is simply use the atom <link/> element. We’re using rel=”link” to indicate that this is just a random link of unknown purpose or intent. However, atom requires that a link element have a mime-type. Given that we have no idea what the mime-type for the URI is, what mime-type should we use?

Some examples of links that we’ve published in the last few minutes follow:

For an example feed that contains entries that link to the New York Times, see:

http://atom.pubsub.com/32/6c/1bc36c085cdc9ecd23efa73a.xml

Is there a better “rel” value then “link”? What mime-type should we be using? Is there a better way to accomplish what we’re doing?

Your comments would be appreciated. If we’ve done something completely insane here, please be gentle.

bob wyman

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