Bob Wyman wrote:
Robert Sayre wrote:
You can point to an alternate feed like this <link rel="alternate" type="some/feed" href="..." /> Of course, you can't have two alternates with the same media type...
Yes, you can point to an alternate. However, all you are doing at that point is establishing equivalence between the two. The "alternate" mechanism doesn't provide you with a way to say which feed is preferred. It also does not allow you to establish that one feed is a sub-set of another (as in the case of "category" feeds.).
Establishing equivalence only addresses a part of the problem.
Fully agree. I just wanted to point out that a part of the problem is more solved than your post indicated.
If you provide an old-format Atom feed today, will you continue to do so after Atom V1.0 is released? If not, how will automated readers or crawlers discover that it is no longer necessary to seek your old feed or that you have a new feed that replaces it? If you had supported an RSS feed in the past but now decided to switch to an Atom feed, how would the aggregators discover that this was your intention without causing a break in their ability to process your posts?
I've encountered this situation in the past. Some aggregators continue to poll both locations, though. Not sure why. If they're doing it on purpose, I'm not sure they'd pay attention to feed links either.
--------------------------------------------- GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1 Host: www.franklinmint.fm ...
HTTP/1.x 301 Moved Permanently Date: Thu, 07 Apr 2005 18:10:30 GMT Location: http://franklinmint.fm/atom.atom ... ---------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------- GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1 Host: www.franklinmint.fm ...
HTTP/1.x 301 Moved Permanently Date: Thu, 07 Apr 2005 18:10:36 GMT Location: http://franklinmint.fm/atom.atom ... ---------------------------------------------
Robert Sayre
