[whatwg] a rel=attachment

Kevin Marks kevinmarks at gmail.com
Fri Jul 15 18:53:46 PDT 2011


Enclosure is precisely this use case.

You can go back and grep
http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/entire-arch.txt for enclosure for the
discussion if you like. After much debate, rel="enclosure" was used to
replace RSS's <enclosure> element, preserving the name.

This will lead you back via the RSS specs to this post by Dave Winer in 2001:

http://www.thetwowayweb.com/payloadsforrss

which makes the same analogy with email that you're using for "attachment"

The original example RSS file there:

http://static.userland.com/gems/backend/gratefulDead.xml

Is usefully rendered by Firefox and Safari, by translating the XML
file into an HTML representation that makes sense to users, and allows
subscription to it.

The same is true for any Atom or RSS feed containing podcasts.

Sadly, Chrome just shows a document dump of the XML tree, useless to anyone.

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 6:30 PM, Peter Kasting <pkasting at google.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 6:25 PM, Tantek Çelik <tantek at cs.stanford.edu>wrote:
>
>> ** Specs *and* publishers/consumers/implementations of rel-enclosure exist
>> (see aforementioned wiki page).
>
>
> The list on the wiki page, which I assume is non-exhaustive, is
> extraordinarily uncompelling.

Indeed, that could do with updating with newer examples and references
to oterh support.

>
>
>> And the name is based on re-using the existing term with the same semantic
>> from the Atom spec.
>>
>
> Don't care.  Atom feeds and HTML pages are very different things.  Basically
> I echo all of Tab's annoyances with this.
>

Atom/RSS Feeds are seen as useful HTML sources by many browser implementations.


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