Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

I wrote the following a while back on the flockstars mailing list:

…the more I think about it, the more I think that users shouldn’t have to copy/paste a feed URL directly. Instead, whatever you’re copying into should be smart enough to find the <link> tags automatically. …

The distinction between a feed url and a site url feels more like a technical distinction, not a semantic distinction.

As Bill pointed out, this is only useful if your aggregator knows how to follow autodiscovery links. So I decided to see which aggregators were able to do this. I decided to use this site’s URL because it has two autodiscovery links (entries and comments) and I wanted to see how aggregators handled that as well. I tried almost all the aggregator urls found in the log files for this site.

So it looks like most aggregators understand autodiscovery. And because most understand autodiscovery, it’s not really necessary to have an orange feed icon as a clickable link. A feed isn’t for human consumption, so why make it clickable?

Alternately one could have the icon go to a page describing what a feed is or perhaps point out the autodiscovery icon in the user’s browser.

And yes, I realize I still have the link on my site. I’m thinking about what to do about it.