fantasai wrote: > > Nikolas 'Atrus' Coukouma wrote: > > > I think you have three separate cases of autodiscovery: > > * the feed for *this* page - handled by this autodiscovery proposal > > * other feeds the author reads or recommends - usually done by linking > > to a separate file. Some quick searching reveals one suggestion to use > > rel="blogroll" for this > > * any other feeds linked to for any reason at all - seems to be little > > interest in > > > > I don't think combining these three into one case will do any good. In > > fact, I think it's confusing and unusable. > > That makes sense. > > I think that you're missing one key use case, though: autodiscovery of > a blog's main feed from sub-parts of it. A lot of websites link to the > main blog feed from individual entries, for example, and they're doing > it with rel="alternate", which is not appropriate. It frustrates me that > there is no way of changing these links to not use rel="alternate".
An excellent point. Perhaps these should use rel="home" :) <link rel="home" type="application/atom+xml" href="/xml/feed.atom"> > > And for linking to other pages.. Here's a real-world example: > The mozilla.org main page <http://www.mozilla.org/> is an example > of where rel="alternate" is a problem. There were three feeds on > it: "Announcements", "mozillaZine News", and "Mozilla Weblogs" > (now only two). Each one is an alternate of a web page, but of > _other_ pages (http://www.mozilla.org/news.html, > http://www.mozillazine.org/, and http://planet.mozilla.org/ > respectively), not the mozilla.org > front page. The last few headlines for each feed are listed on > the front page, and the designer felt it was appropriate for > autodiscovery to work on this page -- but it is not appropriate > for rel="alternate" to be used for those autodiscovery links. > They are not alternate representations of the front page. These other feeds are suggestion/blogroll cases. > > Here's another example: > LiveJournal creates a "Friends" page, where it aggregates the > blogs of all the users you've designated as "friends". It could > create an Atom feed representing this aggregation, and mark that > as rel="alternate". Actually, a patch was just committed to do this ;) > What could also be useful, however, would be > linking to each of these blogs' feeds individually as well so > that they're represented individually in my aggregator and it > can aggregate them itself. Unlike the pre-aggregated feed, > however, these are not alternate representations of the Friends > page, and shouldn't be marked as such. I think this is a suggestion/blogroll case. > > Making it possible for pages to link to non-alternate autodiscoverable > feeds without using rel="alternate" -- and encouraging this practice -- > would make it possible for UAs to actually /discriminate/ between > alternate and non-alternate feeds. Right now they can't, because > everything is indiscriminately marked as "alternate". > > ~fantasai I've basically concluded that the keys to autodiscovery of feeds, in the general sense, should not be three (rel, type, and href), but two (type and href). Type is plenty of specification that it's a feed. Claiming it's relationship as "feed" doesn't seem correct. There are a few mime-types used, and the one for atom (application/atom+xml) will be an official standard as soon as the draft is accepted by the IETF. The value of rel, if present, will vary based on relation * the feed for *this* page - rel="alternate" * the feed for main feed for this blog, in general - rel="home" * other feeds the author reads or recommends - rel="suggested" * any other feeds linked to for any reason at all - no rel, just the type and href Is this acceptable? I'm not completely happy with "home" and "suggested" because they're not specified as link types in the HTML specs [1]. Sadly, it seems the HTML authors didn't consider these cases. "home" seems to be an informal standard. Close matches in the HTML list are "index", "contents", and "start". All of these are inaccurate, but I think "contents" is the best fit. "suggested" is just my own idea. I mentioned the rel="blogroll" before, but that seems overly specific. "bookmark" seems to be the closest match in the HTML list. Not in the way it's defined in the list, but the way people usually think of it. I'm not sure what the heck the HTML spec is indicating with: "Refers to a bookmark. A bookmark is a link to a key entry point within an extended document. The title attribute may be used, for example, to label the bookmark. Note that several bookmarks may be defined in each document." That definition makes it a close match to "home," I suppose. Really, the definition there is so vague that it's useless. I can think of a couple other cases: - Comment feeds, which are only generated by a few pieces of software so far. These are close to, but not quite, alternate. they're usually missing the entry itself, from what I understand. I think more work needs to be done with comment feeds in general before we worry too much about linking to them. -Changelogs. Wikis are one of the use cases for Atom, yes? Perhaps they should have a rel="changelog" or something similar. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/abstraction.html#dt_LinkTypes -Nikolas 'Atrus' Coukouma
