Feed, know thyself?

This relates to an issue I've raised over on the Atom list [1] but if
I'm right in thinking it's worth looking at over there, it'll be worth
considering over here too, especially if a revision of the RSS spec is
being contemplated. Any sanity-checking of the Atom proposal would
also be appreciated.

Thing is, there isn't a clear way for a feed to refer to itself. The
current RSS spec says of the channel resource:
[[
The {resource} URL of the channel element's rdf:about attribute must
be unique with respect to any other rdf:about attributes in the RSS
document and is a URI which identifies the channel. Most commonly,
this is either the URL of the homepage being described or a URL where
the RSS file can be found.
]]

This makes sense in the context of RDF Site Summary, where the feed
can be considered an equivalent resource to the homepage etc. But with
the tendency for feeds to be more content-oriented, this equivalence
may no longer hold. It also means that for something like an
RDF-oriented aggregator app it may mean a little extra complexity to
get an update to the data (do a GET on the URI, if response is (X)HTML
it'll be necessary to apply autodiscovery to get the feed URI).

The immediate practical reason for my raising this over at Atom is for
the purpose of easy feed subscription. Clicking the [Atom] link on
someone's blog from a browser will get a response with Atom's mime
type (this is pretty well sorted - new versions of Apache and IIS will
be delivering .atom files appropriately). This should trigger any
registered handler app for that mime type. But, as I understand it
(could be wrong - I haven't found confirmation one way or the other),
most browsers, including IE, don't pass the source URI along to the
handler app. So some clear way of pointing the handler to the feed is
needed for subscription. Including the feed URI in the feed XML seems
a reasonable workaround. This info may make things like provenance
tracking easier too.

The proposal I've roughed out for Atom is at [2], it uses Atom's Link
Construct at feed level, inserting an element that would look like
this:

<link rel="self" href="http://example.org/feed.atom" />

So I'd like to see if folks over here think this works, whether it's
something RSS 1.0bis (and Atom) could do with.

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg12170.html
[2] http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/PaceFeedLink

-- 

http://dannyayers.com


 
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