On Monday, August 29, 2005, at 10:12 AM, Mark Pilgrim wrote:
On 8/26/05, Graham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
(And before you say "but my aggregator is nothing but a podcast
client, and the feeds are nothing but links to enclosures, so it's
obvious that the publisher wanted me to download them" -- WRONG! The
publisher might want that, or they might not ...
So you're saying browsers should check robots.txt before downloading
images?
...
Normal Web browsers are not robots, because they are operated by a
human, and don't automatically retrieve referenced documents (other
than inline images).
As has been suggested, to "inline images", we need to add frame
documents, stylesheets, Java applets, external JavaScript code, objects
such as Flash files, etc., etc., etc. The question is, with respect to
feed readers, do external feed content (<content src="..." />),
enclosures, etc. fall into the same exceptions category or not? If
not, then what's the best mechanism for telling feed readers whether
they can download them automatically--robots.txt, another file like
robots.txt, or something in the XML? I'd prefer something in the XML.
A possibility:
<feed>
<ext:auto-download target="enclosures" default="false" />
<ext:auto-download target="content" default ="true" />
...
<entry>
<link rel="enclosure" href="..." ext:auto-download="yes" />
<content src="..." ext:auto-download="0" />
...
