Feed Autodiscovery
We’ve recently added link
types to HTML 5. In particular we defined
the mechanism for syndication feed autodiscovery. Autodiscovery has
become widely deployed and implemented already since its inception in
2002, using the link element with the alternate relationship and a type attribute
indicating the format of the feed.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml"
href="/feed.atom" title="Atom Feed">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
href="/feed.rss" title="RSS Feed">For backwards compatibility, we must retain support for, and explicitly define,
that method. However, there are two main issues with using the alternate
relationship:
- Syndication feeds are not necessarily alternate representations of the page.
- The MIME type is not always a good indication that a resource is a feed.
For example, hAtom uses regular HTML with the MIME type
text/html, yet may still be used as a syndication feed format.
To address this issue, we have introduced a new feed relationship which indicates
that the referenced document is a syndication feed. This now allows you to
link to several different feeds containing different content which are not necessarily
alternate versions of the page.
<link rel="feed" type="application/atom+xml"
href="/feed/comments" title="All comments">
<link rel="feed" type="application/atom+xml"
href="/feed/summaries" title="Article Summaries">It also means that you do not need to specify the type attribute to have the
link recognised as a syndication feed and browsers can still show it in the
subscription list.
<link rel="feed" href="/feed" title="Articles">Another benefit of this is that if there is ever a new syndication feed format, you don’t have to wait for browsers to be updated with the new MIME type to recognise it as a feed. For instance, if your feed reader supports the hAtom microformat, you could subscribe to an HTML document that has been linked to as a feed.
<link rel="feed" type="text/html"
href="/feed.html" title="All comments">In order to retain backwards compatibility, the definition
for alternate says
that when used in combination with a type attribute with the value of either
application/rss+xml or application/atom+xml.then it implies the feed keyword
as well.
The feed keyword can also be used in combination with alternate to say that
it is specifically the feed for the current document.
<link rel="feed alternate" type="application/atom+xml"
href="/feed.atom" title="Atom Feed">However, it’s important not to confuse this with the way alternate stylesheets
works. The behaviour of rel="alternate stylesheet" is a special
case where the use of alternate doesn’t mean an alternate representation
of the document itself. In fact, if when used together with stylesheet, that
is the one case where the type value cannot imply the feed value.
<link rel="alternate stylesheet" type="application/atom+xml"
href="/feed.atom" title="This is not a feed!">Mozilla already has bugs filed for implementing
the new feed relationship and fixing its bug
with with rel="alternate stylesheet" which are planned for inclusion
in Firefox 3.0.