Website Design Forum - Syndication and Content Negotiation (RSS, Atom)

Author

Syndication and Content Negotiation (RSS, Atom)

Jason

2006-05-30, 6:50 pm

I've recently come to the fork in the road as to which syndication format to
support RSS 2.0, RDF-RSS (.90 & 1.0) or Atom.
Most sites I see provide all three. This would be particularly easy as the
feed itself would be generated from a db and therefore, a simple script
could generate each of them. However, I dislike how most websites link to
these different formats as many (most?) users don't know the difference and
many (most?) rss readers support all of them anyway. Additionally, as many
sites offer varied feeds (links, article summaries, full articles, portfolio
feeds, etc) offering a different version for each feed is unmanageable and
scales horribly. While thinking about these issues, I thought of how I
currently handle content negotiation with html, xhtml and xml. (Supplying
XHTML content as HTML to IE, and as XML to others - per compliance). Can
this be done with syndication? I could see linking to one resource that has
variants on the server that are delivered according to the preferred version
as sent in request headers by the reader. Does this exist? Is it a good
idea? If it is a good idea and isn't being done, should it be proposed
somewhere?

Thoughts welcome,

- Jason

(If there is another group or mailing list more suitable for this question,
please advise.)