@mckinley@twtxt.net Thank you! I didn’t even know about signing and encrypting XML documents. Right, RSS is a little bit messy.
Unfortunately, the autodiscovery document in one of your linked resources does not exist anymore. What annoys me in Atom is the distinction between <id> and <link>. I always want my URL also to be my ID, so I have to duplicate that – unnecessarily in my opinion.
Also, never found a good explanation why I should add <link rel="self" … /> to my feeds. I just do, but I don’t understand why. The W3C Feed Validation Service says:
[…] This value is important in a number of subscription scenarios where often times the feed aggregator only has access to the content of the feed and not the location from which the feed was fetched.
This just sounds like a very questionable bandaid to bad software architecture. Why would the feed parser need access to the feed URL at this stage? And if so, why not just pass down the input source? Just doesn’t make sense to me.
Also, I just noticed that I reference the http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/ namespace, but don’t use it in most of my feeds. Gotta fix that. Must have copied that from my yfav feed without paying attention what I’m doing.
Your article made me reread the Atom spec and I found out, that I can omit the <author> in the <entry> when I specify a global <author> at <feed> level. Awesome! Will do that as well and thus reduce the feed size.
I always want my URL also to be my ID, so I have to duplicate that – unnecessarily in my opinion.
Interesting. I understand what you’re saying, but I find the duplicated functionality of the RSS <guid> to be confusing. I think it would make more sense if the roles were reversed: use the <link> as the ID if there’s no <guid> and never use the <guid> as a permalink. Bonus points if a <guid> is required if a <link> is not present.
Actually, when doing research for this post, I stumbled upon this blog post: How to make a good ID in Atom
I have no idea how I ended up at a blog post from 2004 that hasn’t been online since 2011, but I did. Regardless, he has a point. I had never heard of tag URIs before. I think I’ll start using them.