Subject: Atom Feed Autodiscovery

From: Anne van Kesteren <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 00:30:53 +0200

Some points I was wondering about:

* Does the TYPE attribute MUST/SHOULD/MAY match the actual MIME type of
   the referenced file?
   (Can 'application/xml' work too?)
* If a LINK element has TITLE, should that make it more preferred than a
   LINK element without?
* Using "<element-name>" makes it look like you are referring to the
   tag. Which is not the case, since both the HEAD and BODY element's
   start and end tag are optional in HTML.

-- 
  Anne van Kesteren
  <http://annevankesteren.nl/>

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From: Mark Pilgrim <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 19:15:39 -0400

>    (Can 'application/xml' work too?)

The answer is two-fold.

1. As per the HTML specification [1] and the Authoritative Metadata
best practices document [2], the @type attribute is advisory only. 
Its purpose is to provide a hint to clients as to what they may
reasonably expect at the other end of @href, without dereferencing it.
 If a client chooses to dereference the @href, its Content-Type is
authoritative.

2. The only @type value defined for Atom autodiscovery elements is
"application/atom+xml".  Any other @type value is not an Atom
autodiscovery element.  Publishers who use other values are not
supporting Atom autodiscovery, and client behavior in such instances
is beyond the scope of this specification.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#adef-type-A
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/mime-respect.html#specs

-- 
Cheers,
-Mark

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From: Danny Ayers <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 10:43:58 +0200

Thanks Mark, this RFC is really good to see - seems very clear and
unambiguous, and should make life easier for a lot of people.

One minor editorial point - I wonder if it might be possible to flag
somehow the parts that are Atom-specific, so it's obvious when
questions like Anne's appear whether the place to look for
clarification is the Atom or (X)HTML specs.

Cheers,
Danny.