[whatwg] Inferring rel="feed" from the media type

[Mark Baker]

Ian,

On 11/29/06, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Mark Baker wrote:
> >
> > When you're documenting age-old practice which is in widespread use, I
> > fully agree.  Feed autodiscovery is effectively brand new and not
> > widespread at all when compared to how widespread it should become in 20
> > years.  I think there's still lots of time to fix it.
>
> I'm not sure what you're basing your assertion on; based on my own
> research of several billion documents, feed autodiscovery is used on
> hundreds of millions of pages, far beyond the point of no return in terms
> of backwards-compatibility constraints.

I wouldn't call that a very good metric for the purposes of this
discussion though, because I expect that the bulk of those pages are
produced by a handful of blog hosting services.  If we can shrink
"100s of millions" by 4 or 5 (or more) orders of magnitude with a
handful of persuasively written emails, then the situation is not what
I would call "widespread".

Are you able to analyze what proportion of those pages are hosted by
the top, say, 10 hosters?

We'd also have to consider the aggregators too of course, which
consume that data.  That should also be manageable, although I expect
more work than for the data publishers.

Mark.