Return of the Zombie Robots and Other Stories

A lot of buzz about enabling feed autodiscovery. The idea being that a newsreader/aggregator could be pointed at site (e.g. a blog) and it would be able find any non-HTML data files such as Atom feeds without leaving buttons all over the place.

There's been sporadic discussion of this around Atom, but things have accelerated in the last few days after proposals emerged from O'Reilly's not-so-secret camp. Atomic Hero Sam Ruby has captured much of this information on a Wiki entitled FDML (a physical and spiritual neighbour to the Atom Wiki). Jeremy Zawodny got the discussion going on the syndication mailing list.

tima, James Snell and others have been looking at the format, and there's bits of discussion of the mechanism scattered around blogsville - e.g. Diego Doval looking through RSS spectacles and Tim Bray looks at the general requirements and points to his suggestion that we need to say what a Site actually is.

Law School fellow Dave Winer has proposed myPublicFeeds.opml, a system based around using a "well-known" location (like robots.txt) for the feed list, which would be stored in the OPML format. The use of a fixed location was criticised on the list, the reasons being set out by Joe Gregorio and some guy called Berners-Lee. The OPML format has also received criticism, and is unlikely to find its way into any general solution.

One key to autodiscovery that has more or less been agreed is the use of a <link> element in the head of documents on the site. This would point to a file listing available channels. Jeremy Z. envisaged cases where this might not be possible (a website without HTML!). Chad Everett came up with an ingenious suggestion for a fallback option: point to the feed list file from robots.txt.

Comments

[Anu]

Whats the default html file served for a site?

Usually index.html or default.htm, but configureable in the Web Server right?

GETing www.mycooldomain.com gets me the default html file index.html

what about
www.mycooldomain.com/.xml getting the default xml file, which could contain all sorts of metadata pointing to other resources.

[Augustus]

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