Re: shared feed lists
"Bill Kearney" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.network.syndication.discuss |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
> It is sufficient if one has the ability to add <link> tags to their > <head>. But what if you cannot? Under what situations would you not be able to do this? What tools in current use have this limitation? I'm not arguing it's not possible, more that it's an edge case, not the norm. > > Where robots.txt works, in that it's intended as a tool that something > > potentially causing TREMENDOUS amount of traffic can use as a guide, is useful > > the same can hardly be said of an index file of this nature. The favicon.ico > > thing is little more than just another vendor embrace and extend hack. > > The analogy isn't quite right here. favicon.ico generates a lot of > traffic because most browsers request it. robots.txt is requested by > most well-behaved robots. This file is intended to be a simple > bootstrap--a way of finding the feeds. It should be requested > infrequently and by relatively specific tools. What's troubling here is two-fold. Use of a static filename needlessly burdens sites that offer this data dynamically. Second it opens the door to using poorly-mannered spiders that go digging for stuff that's never going to exist. Not to mention the idea that if a site's go the data dynamically we end up forcing them to jerry-rig things in their httpd.conf to rewrite the static URL to the script. Granted, this is likely an edge case as well but one perhaps slightly larger than the "can't alter the head section" group. Besides, this also raises the hassle of the format being used ending up being far too limited. If we've got a shot at exposing valuable information it might as well be thought out. Now, all this said, I think the idea of promoting a set of best practices that raises the level of feed awareness is a GOOD thing, technical arguments notwithstanding. -Bill Kearney Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/