Nikolas 'Atrus' Coukouma wrote:
fantasai wrote:
I think you've missed how things are working at the moment. Most
programs implemented what's in the spec before it's written. Mark is
trying to negotiate a common standard when implementations already
exist. A lot of experimentation has already occurred.
I'm not suggesting that the spec invalidate such well-entrenched practice,
but that it allows an alternative (not requiring 'alternate') for situations
in which it is not appropriate.
One of the key points seems to be that autodiscovery is not meant to
find all feeds linked to on a page, just the ones that serve as
alternates to the current one. If people wanted this functionality, they
would have done it by now.
Done what? Linked to non-alternate feeds with rel=alternate just so
that it would trigger autodiscovery? People do that all the time. Give
them an alternative that doesn't require such a hack.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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
