The RSS Blog

News and commentary from the RSS and OPML community.

Kevin Burton: I've been playing with xml:base support in Atom and can't help but feel it was a bad idea.

http://www.feedblog.org/2005/12/xmlbase_was_a_b.html

Randy: I've always been a big fan of absolute URLs. Although I don't agree with Kevin's reasons, I agree with his conclusion. Just give me absolute URLs and don't waste my time. Ya, everybody could write the appropriate algo, or we could avoid the relative URL problems of HTML and stick with absolutes. It's a choice. Maybe I'll just avoid xml:base support in R-mail. I have 10k users. That should mean something.

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As a data point, the relative image URLs are broken in Tim's feed when I view it in the latest version of Safari (which otherwise does a fine job with all the other Atom 1.0 feeds (including my own) that I've thrown at it.)  Of course, I use absolute URLs everywhere.

I guess Atom needed it's own version of "SkipHours" -- something that's cute in theory but broken in practice. :)
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