Mark Nottingham announces the release of The Atom Syndication Format 0.3. Mark Pilgrim provides valuable upgrade assistance. We've fully updated our feed to conform to the 0.3 spec. Most notably, our feed now makes use of the recently proposed <info> tag to display an explanatory message when viewed in a browser. We've chosen not to style individual entries.
Our Atom 0.2 feed is still available for comparison.
One particular change to Atom has left us perplexed. Previously, Atom <link> tags contained only a resource's address, with no attributes, like this:
<link>http://www.example.com/</link>
The new format requires the type attribute, which lists the target document's media type, like this:
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.example.com/"/>
As regular readers know, we're serving our documents as 'application/xhtml+xml' to browsers that support it and 'text/html' to those that don't. There's no way to tell from our Atom feed which media type your browser will get. As a result, we're not sure which media type to use in our feed's <link> tags (or if it even matters). Let us know what you think.