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January 26, 2006

Another Feed Question

What are the common types RSS and Atom are served up as? Not just the "correct" types but also the common other values, server misconfiguration or not?

Posted by ben at January 26, 2006 6:52 PM

Comments

In my experience, any time a feed is misconfigured server-side, it comes down the pipe as text/plain.

More often than not, they're transfered as text/xml.

Posted by: Charles at January 26, 2006 7:01 PM

For RSS Wordpress does text/xml... that's how just about every one I've seen is done.

Atom tends to not use text/xml.

Posted by: Robert Accettura at January 26, 2006 7:10 PM

Mine is "text/xml; charset=UTF-8", except when it's cached on the server, in which case it's "text/html" :(

Posted by: Jesse Ruderman at January 26, 2006 7:26 PM

Atom should be served as application/atom+xml and RSS as application/rss+xml.

Posted by: Remi Prevost at January 26, 2006 7:32 PM

For Atom, I've seen: application/atom+xml (good), application/xml (ok), text/xml (bad), text/plain (very bad)

For RSS, I've seen: application/rss+xml (invalid, not a registered mime type), application/xml (good), application/rdf+xml (rss 1.0), text/xml (bad), text/plain (very bad), text/html (idiotic but it happens)

Posted by: James Snell at January 26, 2006 8:39 PM

And let's not forget Apple's Photocasting feeds ("industry standard RSS"), served as application/octet-stream.

But the numbers I've seen have always put text/xml, application/(rss|rdf|atom)+?xml, text/plain, and text/html at 99% or higher. If you only sniff those types, I won't be nervous about the evangelism load from other types.

Posted by: Phil Ringnalda at January 26, 2006 11:02 PM

Sadly, I don't think we can sniff text/html without suffering a plt hit.

Posted by: Ben at January 26, 2006 11:14 PM

I dumped an OPML from my feed reader and wrote a quick shell script. I've got 88 feeds, mostly RSS 2, I think, but more than a few older RSS and Atom feeds. Here's the counts I got for content-types:

37 text/xml
19 application/xml
10 text/html
6 application/rdf+xml
6 application/atom+xml
3 text/plain
1 application/rss+xml
1 application/octet-stream

Posted by: Logan at January 27, 2006 4:52 AM

Won't tolerance for bad types push people not to correct their software and help propagate the anarchy ?

Posted by: jmdesp at January 27, 2006 6:58 AM

I used to use application/atom+xml for my Atom feed and Live Bookmarks read it just fine, but when I actually tried to view the feed (to debug, usually) Ff 1.0 would prompt me to download the "unknown" file type. So I switched to text/xml just so I could view the thing in the browser. If you made/make a/a+x work I promise I'll switch my MIME-type back :)

Posted by: Jason at January 27, 2006 8:58 AM

Ben,

Would you be able to release any info on how Firefox 2 will handle feeds differently? Will we be departing from the Live Bookmarks method in use now?

In addition- and my apologies if this is a little off-topic- you blogged some time ago about tab behaivour, and I remember you discussing the possiblity of close buttons on each tab. Were any advances made in this area? I'm keen to see if this is implemented, and if so, if the Mac version will have the close button on the left of the tab ;-)

Again, apologies if the second question is OT

Many thanks

Posted by: Mr Lizard at January 27, 2006 4:12 PM

Mr Lizard, the close buttons on each tab feature is already on trunk (and probably on the branch too?)

Posted by: Caleb at January 28, 2006 2:44 AM

Your ignorance in the matter is a good reason to leave feed handling out of Firefox. You have no idea what you got yourself into. The feed world is riddled with special cases, opaque docs, turf wars...
Please note that I'm not trolling.

Posted by: Giacomo at January 30, 2006 5:11 AM

Giacomo, it's not an easy problem, but the whole web is thus. Should Firefox not be? :)

Posted by: Jeremy Dunck at February 6, 2006 5:23 PM

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