Important Information for web publishers about IE7 feed detection

This content originally appeared on Modern Web Development with Chrome and was authored by Paul Kinlan

<p>Just the other day, after I have been posting about how IE7 automatically detects feeds I have found a link (<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2005/08/03/446904.aspx"><a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2005/08/03/446904.aspx">http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2005/08/03/446904.aspx</a></a>) by the Longhorn RSS team at Microsoft which details some information about how IE7 detects feeds on a page.<p />Currently, beta 1 only supports RSS. Atom support is expected in later Beta's. For IE7 to detect a feed on your page the page must contain the a snippet of HTML similar to:<p /><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="your feed title here" href="http://www.company.com/feedurl.rss"><p />This will enable IE7 to auto discover the feed for the page. What IE7 will not do is to automatically show feeds that are linked to directly on a page. Furthermore, if the if the "type" attribute on the "Link" tag is "text/xml" (like it used to be on my page) IE7 Beta1 will not pick it up as a valid feed. I have no idea if this will be fixed in the next versions.<p />I would have liked it to display a notification of other feed links on a page, so that I can quickly subscribe to these. On my blog, related topics are given to the user via a link to an HTML page or via a link to a RSS feed. I would have liked it if some of these would be visible to the user via the feed notification button.<p />I have adjusted my blog to now indicate that it has a feed (thanks to the RSS teams blog article), however it still doesn't render in IE7 properly.<p />One thing to note about the RSS feed is that it is converted by 2RSS.com on the fly, so it will also include adverts in. Sorry about that.<p /></p>

This content originally appeared on Modern Web Development with Chrome and was authored by Paul Kinlan