Robert Sayre wrote:
> You can point to an alternate feed like this
> <link rel="alternate" type="some/feed" href="..." />
> Of course, you can't have two alternates with the same media type...
Yes, you can point to an alternate. However, all you are doing at
that point is establishing equivalence between the two. The "alternate"
mechanism doesn't provide you with a way to say which feed is preferred. It
also does not allow you to establish that one feed is a sub-set of another
(as in the case of "category" feeds.).
Establishing equivalence only addresses a part of the problem.
If you provide an old-format Atom feed today, will you continue to
do so after Atom V1.0 is released? If not, how will automated readers or
crawlers discover that it is no longer necessary to seek your old feed or
that you have a new feed that replaces it? If you had supported an RSS feed
in the past but now decided to switch to an Atom feed, how would the
aggregators discover that this was your intention without causing a break in
their ability to process your posts?
bob wyman
-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Sayre [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2005 1:44 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: One reason we have duplicates entries is that we have duplicate
feeds...
Bob Wyman wrote:
> Unfortunately, while RSS and Atom
> both contain mechanisms to identify their "HTML" alternates, there isn't
any
> clear mechanism available to discover alternate feeds.
Without responding to the rest of the message, I'll note that this
statement is somewhat inaccurate wrt Atom. You can point to an alternate
feed like this
<link rel="alternate" type="some/feed" href="..." />
Of course, you can't have two alternates with the same media type...
Robert Sayre
