[whatwg] PaceEntryMediatype

[fantasai]

Thomas Broyer wrote:
> 
> There's no need to fetch every link if you base your assumptions on
> the type="" attribute (and *only* the type="" attribute, not the
> combination with any special rel="" attribute value).

How does this solution deal with, e.g. hAtom?
   http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom
The content type does not help you there. Some other meta-information
is necessary.

>> Fair enough. They still exist, though. Browser vendors aren't going to
>> stop supporting this. We would be just sticking our heads in the sand if
>> we ignored this.
> 
> Many things are marked as "deprecated" in earlier HTML versions, and
> are still supported by browsers.
> Also, as the misuse of rel="alternate" is not machine testable, and
> given that I don't propose "banning" the use of rel="alternate" for
> feed autodiscovery, I can't see how a browser vendor could "stop
> supporting this".

I agree that misusing "alternate" to link to feeds that are not an alternate
representation of the page should be non-conforming.

> Of course yes, and they will be discovered based on the content-type,
> and rel="" will deserve its real role: describing the relationship
> between the two resources (and not describing the other end of the
> link).

I agree that the "feed" link type is not /quite/ a proper link type--
it's more of a meta-content-type--but I've come to conclusion that the
problem it solves, and how neatly it solves it, eclipses this (subtle)
semantic distinction.

> Definition of feed: a bag of items; the representation of a feed
> generally exposes only the 10, or so, latest created or updated items.
> You'll note that this has nothing to do with the feed "format" (Atom,
> RSS, a Web log's homepage in HTML, etc.)
> If a document was once linked from a feed's representation as an item,
> it is an item of this feed, even if the feed's current representation
> doesn't link to it anymore. The relationship still exists. This
> relationship is "I am an item of this feed" or "this is a feed within
> which I once appeared". I propose representing it as rel="feed".
...
> Anyway, if you link to something, there's a reason. This reason is
> that there is a relationship between the current document and the
> thing the link points to. This relationship is described in the rel=""
> attribute.
> "It is *a* feed" is not a valid reason, it doesn't describe a relationship.
> "This is an alternate representation of this page in a format you can
> subscribe to" is a valid reason: it's an alternate representation.
> "I am an item of this feed" is a valid reason: I was once linked from
> it, so you'll find other similar things you might be interested in
> (because they are from the same author, or about the same subject,
> etc. this is to be "explained" to the user using the title=""
> attribute, that's not something a "machine" has to know about).

That's an interesting relationship. Perhaps it could be expressed as
"index feed" within the context of WA1.0's current link type definitions.
In any case, I would like to see this use case definitively addressed.
Such a link would be the most appropriate default feed to subscribe to
from an entry page, if it were somehow clearly labelled.

~fantasai