[whatwg] PaceEntryMediatype

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 1 Dec 2006, Thomas Broyer wrote:
> 
> A summary of my problem with HTML5's autodiscovery:
> - there shouldn't be a 'rel' value for "subscribability",
> subscribability is a matter of whether and how an UA can process
> content from a particular media type

Agreed. The spec doesn't mention subscribing, just that rel=feed means 
it's a syndication feed.


> - HTML5 shouldn't say anything about which media type is
> "subscribable": application/atom+xml can be an Atom Entry, and there
> might be other subscribable media types (some aggregators allow you to
> subscribe to HTML); in other words, there shouldn't be any assumption
> of subscribability *from within the spec*.

Agreed, within the constraints of backwards compatibility. While it 
doesn't mention subscribing to them, there are two explicit values for the 
type="" attribute which have been grandfathered into meaning rel=feed. 
This is needed for compatibility with existing content and existing UAs, 
and isn't something that we have any ability to change, given the 
widespread use of these types for that purpose.


> - rel="feed" could be useful, but as a real relationship between 
> resources (the resource pointed to by a rel="feed" link is a 'feed' in 
> which the "current" resource "believes" it appears or has appeared as a 
> contained item), not as defined currently in HTML5.

It sounds like you're describing rel="feed alternate", which is a 
syndication feed explicitly for the current document, as opposed to a 
rel=feed on its own, which is a syndication feed for any random subject.


> Actually my main problems are:
> - the definition of rel="feed"

It's not clear to me what you think needs changing. Could you suggest an 
explicit set of changes that would satisfy you?


> - the assumption that rel="alternate"+Atom or rel="alternate"+RSS is
> equivalent to rel="feed alternate"

This is out of our hands, sadly. There are literally hundreds of millions 
of deployed <link> elements that make those assumptions today. We can't 
break legacy UAs and documents.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'