Please stop doing this

19 Apr 2008, 10am

Surely any semantic machine doing semantic machine-reading will be semantically smart enough to know what to look for. Do we really need to think about it every time?

Just a feed that works will do nicely kthxbai.

20 Apr 2008, 11am

UPDATE  Having seen some responses to this, it’s clear I should’ve been less terse here. My point is that feed autodiscovery as it is in Safari (and Firefox, Camino, Firefox 2 on XP, Opera, iCab) is a very good thing, and I agree it’s perfect for this sort of application, allowing feeds carrying different content to be quickly tweezed out without one having to hunt for links on a page. If however you argue that multiple formats are important because, say, Microsoft prefers RSS while Google prefers Atom, then it’s trivial for you, Microsoft and Google to work that out amongst yourselves (think CSS). Just please don’t require every single person who tries a feed autodiscovery popup to have to decide if they want their ice cream served in a boot, a Pontiac, or a waffle cone.

21 Apr 2008, 9am

UPDATE  Oh, clarity, clarity. For the record I should say I in no way intended to ‘call out’ Dan Hill or his excellent site City of Sound for doing any wrong whatsoever. I merely happened to be subscribing to his feed and was reminded how annoying this particular annoyance is. Really it was just intended as a yo to those now producing templates for web publishing apps to be aware that browser feed autodiscovery + multiple feed formats = vastly bigger problem than any solved by multiple formats.

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