It’s just data

RSS Content Type

Tim Bray: At the moment, there doesn't seem to be much agreement about what Media-type to use for RSS files. Userland, which is kind of the RSS industry leader, serves them as text/xml. Infoworld, a fairly sophisticated tech pub, uses text/html. Mark Pilgrim, a popular blogger who thinks really hard about these things, uses application/rss+xml.

It seems to me that it should match what you use on the link tag.

Sam, I was thinking about this yesterday when I was drafting a servlet example for the rsslibj project. I just ended up setting the content type to text/xml.

Posted by Jason Bell at

Ian Hickson, who taught me everything I know about MIME types, says that all external files should match the type attribute of their LINK tag.

http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1037595583&count=1

Posted by Mark at

Good point. Done! It might be nice if there were a warning about this in the validator.... [more]

Trackback from Not Quite Random

at

I agree with you Sam. I'd noticed this fleetingly before, but had totally forgotten about it until you reminded me. It's not as if one scours HTTP headers on a normal basis...

A quick note too - Blosxom users, don't trip up like I did :-/

Posted by DJ at

Oopsie - caught me too. For those that care, my index.rss is "classic 0.91" and remains text/xml. I have an alternate feed, index.rss2, which is rss 2.0. My HTML's link tag specifies my rss2 feed.

The fix to my heavily hacked up blosxom was to change:

if ($content_type eq 'text/xml')

to:

if ($content_type =~ /xml/)

Posted by Sam Ruby at

Yup, ditto (more or less):

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blosxom/message/270

Posted by DJ at

DJ - I like your fix better. I've changed my code to match.

Posted by Sam Ruby at

For RSS 1.0 there's another alternative : application/rdf+xml

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-swartz-rdfcore-rdfxml-mediatype-01

(though text/xml would be my personal choice at present)

Posted by Danny at

Tim Bray:At the moment, there doesn't seem to be much agreement about what Media-type to use for RSS files. Sam Ruby:It seems to me that it should match what you use on the link tag. Good point. Done! It might be nice if there were a warning about...

Excerpt from Not Quite Random at

The End of Chimera? Mike Pinkerton isn't sure he wants to continue developing Chimera. Mike's the leader of the Chimera project. Chimera is a Mozilla/Gecko-based browser for MacOS X that is JUST a browser: no mail, news, or IRC. It's a lot smaller...

Excerpt from db's Radio Weblog at

Add your comment