intertwingly

It’s just data

Relative RSS links


Tim Bray: Except for I'm resisting one change that the validator wants...

The problem is that most "content management systems" simply schlep the bytes that are often ill formed HTML into an RSS feed that may be placed in a separate directory or even machine. Then a typical "aggregator" simply throws these bytes into a HTML page without really taking the time to understand it.

Simply put, while HTML is easy to author, parsing it seems beyond the capability of most DIY developers and even many commercial software developers.

The RSS specs (all of them) are actually silent on this. They don't specify what a URL should be relative to (many assume that it should be the site, architecturally, it seems like it should be the feed itself). Since the specs are silent, what matters most is what the tools actually support. Advocacy may help fix this.

Tangentially related, I wonder what it would take to get Tim Bray to add a RSS autodiscovery link tag to his html page? One of the tools that supports it is the RSS validator itself.