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The saga of RSS (dis)continuity
It's been almost three years since I first wrote about the problem of RSS feed redirection. From time to time I'm reminded that it's still a problem, and today I noticed that two of the blogs I read were affected by it. I was subscribed to John Ludwig at www.theludwigs.com/index.rdf, and today's entry says "Feed moved -- pls check out www.theludwigs.com/index.xml." In fact he's got an index.xml and an atom.xml, and the latter seems to correspond to what's actually published on the blog, but either way the issue is that we've still yet to agree on a standard way for newsreaders to follow relocated feeds.
The second example comes from Kim Cameron, who lost track of Eric Norlin when he moved from here to here. Kim writes:
Note to community: We have work to do on making it less painful to change URLs when using RSS. Could there be a special tag we could put in the last posting at OLD-URL that tells peoples' blog readers to change their configuration to NEW-URL? Can Dave Winer devise such a thing - or is there some capability defined and I just don't have software that takes advantage of it?
It's been talked about for a long time. Back in 2002, Dave Winer noted a suggestion I made, and the next day Sam Ruby and I both pointed to this idea from Will Cox.
In April of 2003, I again noted the issue, and learned the next day from Dave Winer about an undocumented XML syntax that was supported by at least two newsreaders: Radio UserLand and NetNewsWire. I used the technique then, with some success, and haven't tried it since.
So far as I know, that's where things stand today. If you control your server, you can of course do an HTTP-level redirect. But your blog is hosted, you probably can't, in which case you need to use the feed itself to signal the redirect. There's no standard way to do this in RSS, and the Atom spec is apparently silent on the issue as well.
Kim Cameron is right. This really oughta get fixed, and in a way that works for all readers and all feed formats. Three years ago Dave Winer wrote:
This could be a first experience at really working together, with no flames. What do you think? Is it time??
Yes, it's time.
Update: James Robertson and Dare Obasanjo say that the solution is to Just Use HTTP and lean on the hosting services that don't. Fair enough. How many are there, and what kinds of evangelism and advocacy would be effective?
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