On 23 Nov 2006, at 14:28, Thomas Broyer wrote:
"The feed keyword indicates that the referenced document is a
syndication feed.
"Being a syndication feed" is expressed by the media type, there's no
need for a 'rel' value.
The only reason for such a 'rel' is to replace the "contents" value in
the example above:
<link rel="feed" type="text/html" href="/index.html" />
<link rel="feed" type="application/atom+xml" href="/feed.atom" />
in "blog-like" use-cases where an HTML page serves the same purpose as
a syndication feed, just in an 'alternate' format.
Exactly: you have just made one good point why one should not use
mime types to identify the relation. After all there may be many
different feed representations: html, rss 1.0, rss 2.0, atom,
rdf, ... etc...
There are many other good reasons to not use the "alternate" relation
everywhere. The spec [1] for feed makes the case for a useful
distinction between a feed that can be used to track updates of the
content one is looking at, and something that is just an alternate
representation of the content one is looking at expressed in
application/atom+xml format. This would be the case for the front of
my blog page.
Henry
[1] http://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#feed0
