Thomas Broyer wrote:
There's no need to fetch every link if you base your assumptions on
the type="" attribute (and *only* the type="" attribute, not the
combination with any special rel="" attribute value).
How does this solution deal with, e.g. hAtom?
http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom
The content type does not help you there. Some other meta-information
is necessary.
Fair enough. They still exist, though. Browser vendors aren't going to
stop supporting this. We would be just sticking our heads in the sand if
we ignored this.
Many things are marked as "deprecated" in earlier HTML versions, and
are still supported by browsers.
Also, as the misuse of rel="alternate" is not machine testable, and
given that I don't propose "banning" the use of rel="alternate" for
feed autodiscovery, I can't see how a browser vendor could "stop
supporting this".
I agree that misusing "alternate" to link to feeds that are not an alternate
representation of the page should be non-conforming.
Of course yes, and they will be discovered based on the content-type,
and rel="" will deserve its real role: describing the relationship
between the two resources (and not describing the other end of the
link).
I agree that the "feed" link type is not /quite/ a proper link type--
it's more of a meta-content-type--but I've come to conclusion that the
problem it solves, and how neatly it solves it, eclipses this (subtle)
semantic distinction.
Definition of feed: a bag of items; the representation of a feed
generally exposes only the 10, or so, latest created or updated items.
You'll note that this has nothing to do with the feed "format" (Atom,
RSS, a Web log's homepage in HTML, etc.)
If a document was once linked from a feed's representation as an item,
it is an item of this feed, even if the feed's current representation
doesn't link to it anymore. The relationship still exists. This
relationship is "I am an item of this feed" or "this is a feed within
which I once appeared". I propose representing it as rel="feed".
...
Anyway, if you link to something, there's a reason. This reason is
that there is a relationship between the current document and the
thing the link points to. This relationship is described in the rel=""
attribute.
"It is *a* feed" is not a valid reason, it doesn't describe a relationship.
"This is an alternate representation of this page in a format you can
subscribe to" is a valid reason: it's an alternate representation.
"I am an item of this feed" is a valid reason: I was once linked from
it, so you'll find other similar things you might be interested in
(because they are from the same author, or about the same subject,
etc. this is to be "explained" to the user using the title=""
attribute, that's not something a "machine" has to know about).
That's an interesting relationship. Perhaps it could be expressed as
"index feed" within the context of WA1.0's current link type definitions.
In any case, I would like to see this use case definitively addressed.
Such a link would be the most appropriate default feed to subscribe to
from an entry page, if it were somehow clearly labelled.
~fantasai
