Question: How come Atom and RSS are not registered media types? What do we have TODO to change this?
- Atom media type is application/atom+xml
- RSS media type is application/rss+xml
Found a previous attempt to register by mnot in the Google cache. At one point, this was also an IETF Internet draft, now 404. And here's a non-404 but expired copy of mnot's work.
mnot: application/rss+xml isn't registered, because the IESG wanted a "stable reference" for the spec (it being in the standards tree). So, it's technically incorrect to use it now; this is one of the reasons this is still a confusing issue.
Randy: Politics.
Atom's registration is included in the drafts and will become final with the RFCs.
RSS's registrations are hung up in a no-man's land. When RSS registration was first proposed, the IETF wouldn't accept a reference to "just a document on a website that can change at any time". Following that, Mark Nottingham had written a version of the RSS 0.9x spec as an IETF draft, but that floundered because it was "competition" with the "real" spec, so that never happened. That's the current state of RSS media type registration.
Rob: Politics.
Robert Sayre
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