Auto Discovery Of Rss Feeds

A method for RssReaders to get the address for an RSS feed simply given the URL to a web site. The [ standard way for weblogs is to put a line like this in the <head></head> part of your HTML:

Great. But in the case of AbbeNormal, and any WikiWeblogs that have RssFeeds for a weblog and the wiki as a whole (typically a feed of RecentChanges) there are two feeds. RssReaders will not know how to distinguish, or how to let the user distinguish, unless we tell them. What to do?

Why not vary the title attribute? For example, title="RSS for weblog" and title="RSS for wiki". Assuming the software reading it shows the user that text and lets them choose between them that should work. No RssReaders do this yet as far as i know, but it seems reasonable.

But just to be difficult, from a list of link attributes, rel="alternate":

Designates substitute versions for the document in which the link occurs. When used together with the hreflang attribute [1], it implies a translated version of the document. When used together with the media attribute, it implies a version designed for a different medium (or media).

An RSS feed for a weblog can certainly be seen as a substitute version of the weblog you're in. But an RSS feed for the whole wiki is not. It's an alternative view on an entire site. Looking through the other attributes, i found:

the target document is a navigational aid. A navigational aid may consist of a whole or partial Table of Contents, a list of related documents, an indication of the current document's location within a document hierarchy, or any other information which may be useful to the user.

That seemed closest.

But just because some document somewhere specifies doessn't mean any software is going to make use of it. MoZilla at least can show a menu with any <link> tags (menu View...Show/Hide...Site Navigation Bar). It doesn't recognize "navigator" as anything special. Getting RssReaders to pick up on it would require some advocacy, but i'm not convinced this is the best way to do it yet.

What do you think?

After reviewing the Link Module in XHTML 1.1, there seems to be no appropriate rel-value for a RSS-feed. Either we invent a new one (rel="rss") or we use an existing. "target" is not defined in XHTML 1.1.

But since "alternate" "Designates substitute versions for the document in which the link occurs.", it isn't the link-type of choice.

The problem of more than 1 RSS-feed or more than 1 link-tag in the header, respectively, can only be solved by the User Agents, not in (X)HTML.