Matt Griffith: Do any RSS aggregators use the HTML link element?
[via Joe Gregorio: Ideas, Ideas, Ideas]
This sounds like a fantastic idea. Specifying the location of your RSS feed in a standard machine-readable format would solve a real problem. And as far as I can tell, it’s actually using HTML the way it was intended. (The specification doesn’t mention RSS explicitly; it just open-endedly says that you can use the link tag to designate substitute versions for the document in which the link occurs.
This would certainly seem to qualify.)
The only thing I would add is a title (6/2/2002: example updated to reflect latest standard):
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://diveintomark.org/xml/rss.xml">
Lynx renders the title as a link to the referenced document. You can (and should) use the same technique to link to print-friendly pages, too. And translations, if the page is available in multiple languages.
Next day: don’t miss the followup to this post.
Sunday update: please note, the standard has changed slightly. If you implemented the old version, please read this and update your site and/or tool accordingly. (Don’t you love being an early adopter?)
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