When I click a link to a Word document on a webpage (God forbid), the document opens in Word. When I follow a link to an MP3 file, Winamp adds the file to my playlist. When I click a link to a newsfeed, I get served ugly, unreadable raw XML code. That’s not right!
Why can’t my news aggregator automagically subscribe to the feed? Is it simply a matter of people having to name their feeds .rss instead of .xml, or do we have to serve our feeds with a seperate MIME-type (xml/rss)?
Autodiscovery only goes so far - as long as new users have to go through the cumbersome “First locate the feed on the page, then rightclick, then ‘copy link location’, then switch to your aggregator, then find the ‘add new feed’ menu item, then paste the feed URL, and now it’s added”-process, normal users are not going to bother with RSS feeds.
Is it that simple? Just rename the xml file to rss and everything still works?
I doubt it. The aggregator needs to be able to handle the file, the webserver probably have to serve some special MIME type to the browser etc etc. I am not sure exactly how it should work, hence all the questions in my post :)