I've been blogging a lot about the recent movement to settle on a universal subscription mechanism. Everybody should know that I'm in favor of returning a proper media type. Let me explain a bit why I have settled on this decision and what stands in our way of adopting this universally.

I think it's important to point out that autodiscovery of RSS is a must. Most all of us agree that any blogging system lacking autodisco is incomplete. The question is, "How do you subscribe otherwise?" What should happen when you click on the orange XML icon?

Currently, there seems to be three schools of thought.

• Centralized subscription service proposed by Dave Winer. This is really an abstract proposal to get together and do something. The final solution here is still an unknown. I hate unknown. I hate centralization too. Why do I need to involve a third party?
• The feed: URI scheme proposed by Dare Obasanjo. In this proposal, you would prepend feed: in front of your feed URL. For example, my RSS feed would have the URL feed:https://rssweblog.com/rss.xml. Try this on a freshly squeezed (newly installed) XP Home box.
  

  	The page cannot be displayed
  The page you are looking for might have been removed or had its name changed.

  That's hardly what I want my mundane users experiencing. What's even worse is what would happen to software that wasn't expecting this URI scheme. Dare should be intimately familiar with the following code.
  new System.Xml.XmlDocument().Load(url);
  Better remove that leading feed: URI scheme or you'll end up with an exception.
  System.NotSupportedException: The URI prefix is not recognized.
  A lot of software is simply not gonna work if you use the feed: URI scheme. In other words, don't do this unless you're prepared to sacrifice subscriptions for religion.
• The application/rss+xml media type. In this proposal, you would return application/rss+xml as the Content-Type instead of the text/xml. The best part of this proposal is that people are already doing it. Typepad is already returning application/atom+xml, the atom equivalent to application/rss+xml. SixApart is always about a year ahead of the competition.

You might be wondering what happens when you click on a feed (w/ the application/rss+xml media type) on a freshly squeezed XP Home box. Exactly the same thing that happens when you click on a PDF file (where no PDF reader is installed). Exactly what I'd expect to happen. No PDF reader. No RSS reader. Same message. Goooooooooood!

A side note: Just as SixApart got it right, as usual, before anybody else, Blogger got it completely wrong. Their feeds return application/xml. You can try my Blogger atom feed.

There are two problems with the application/rss+xml media type.

• It's not a registered media type. Note, feed: is not a registered URI scheme.
• It doesn't work in Apache or IIS without some tweaking. Neither does the feed: URI scheme.

We need to address these two issues and quickly.