[Feeds] Re: Should we standardize on a single URL path to RSS feeds?

[Mark <[e-mail]>]

That's a great question!

The problem with the link tag autodiscovery approach is that we see many feed publishers will change their RSS feed paths (not provide a redirect) and forget to update the link, making the link tag unreliable. This issue wouldn't exist if there's an actual standardized path that we can assume all RSS feeds are located.

But the link tag does still serve a purpose in case the feed publisher actually does want to point to the canonical URL to the feed.

Hope this helps.

Mark Kennedy
Engineer
openrss.org

On Monday, December 16th, 2024 at 11:01 AM, Teotime Pacreau <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Have you considered the auto-discovery feature through the HTML meta tag :
> ```
> <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
> href="/feed.rss" title="RSS Feed">
> ```
> ?
>
> Defined in the spec : https://blog.whatwg.org/feed-autodiscovery
>
> Sicerely yours.
> Teotime Pacreau
> https://www.teotimepacreau.fr
>
> Le 16 déc. 2024 16:52, Mark <mark=[e-mail]> a écrit :
>
>> Hey Tim,
>>
>> Oh I'm not a part of the working group.
>> Your question is precisely why I'm inquiring about it. I'd love to know what the recipients of this mailing list think about it, whether or not standardizing on a RSS feed path makes sense discussing in this group, or if the idea even makes sense at all. :)
>>
>> Mark Kennedy
>> Engineer
>> openrss.org
>>
>> On Monday, December 16th, 2024 at 10:22 AM, tim rice <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>>> Morning Mark,
>>>
>>> Is this within the purview of the IETF, and does a similar standard for the other examples that you mentioned exist already?
>>>
>>> Thank you,
>>>
>>> -Tim
>>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 16, 2024 at 7:15 AM Mark <mark=[e-mail]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hey,
>>>>
>>>> My org works on providing RSS feeds for websites that don't have them. And we're seeing a lot of feed readers adopting the unfortunate practice of probing multiple paths to a website just to try to find if there's an RSS feed available (e.g. /rss, /.xm, /feed, etc). It hogs up quite a bit of unnecessary resources. It becomes an even harder hit for servers when all the requests happen at the exact same millisecond. :(
>>>>
>>>> We could benefit from standardizing on a single path so that feed readers can easily find a site's RSS feed. Kind of like the robots.txt file or the favicon.ico file. Everyone knows where they are.
>>>>
>>>> Has the working group ever discussed something like this? I'm curious of your thoughts.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks and hope your week is off to a great start!
>>>>
>>>> Mark Kennedy
>>>> Engineer
>>>> openrss.org
>>>>
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