newLocation element

["Will Cox" <cwcjr@bestweb.net>]

Bill Kearney said: [1]

> [RSS 1.0 is] designed to require a feed to contain it's own source URL.

I'm coming to this party late, so I had to read the spec. This is too hazy
to be a requirement:

<blockquote>The {resource} URL of the channel element's rdf:about attribute
must be unique with respect to any other rdf:about attributes in the RSS
document and is a URI which identifies the channel. <strong>Most
commonly</strong>, this is either the URL of the homepage being described
<strong>or</strong> a URL where the RSS file can be found. [emphasis mine]
</blockquote>

We may want GUIDs to identify the feeds uniquely, but while we're fetching
them from a URL, it would be nice [2] for subscribers to that URL to update
it when the URI changes.

The server could notify you using HTTP redirects, but, as has been
mentioned, that fails when HTTP is not the transport. It fails even when
HTTP _is_ the transport because aggregators don't update in either case.

Take my site, for example. I moved. I've permanently redirected the URL.
People are still reading the feed, in its current state, because of the
redirect. And Syndic8 has me, kindly enough, at both URLs [3] -- because
Syndic8 doesn't notice the permanent redirect.

Google doesn't either. My old site is still more authoritative than the new
one, perhaps because of the sticky links from other pages to it.

But when I cancel my account on that server, the subscriptions -- and
Google's index -- will fail.

/cwc

[1] http://rss.benhammersley.com/archives/000054.html#000054
[2] http://www.coxesroost.net/peanuts/2002/05/10.html#a365
[3]
http://www.syndic8.com/feedlist.php?PHPSESSID=ec7be5bfa081a918af4806ffef107f
c7&ShowMatch=peanut+gallery&ShowStatus=all

--

Smart networks are a Layer 8 problem.
http://www.coxesroost.net/peanuts/