Note: 8

And now I’ve gone down a rabbit-hole about the <link> rel attribute!

Turns out, in 2006 whatwg added a “feed” type to the rel attribute, which would be used like this:

<link rel="feed" href="/feed" title="Articles">

This was from an era when tech companies, to different degrees, were actually supporting RSS.

For example, Firefox and IE had a feature called “RSS Autodiscovery” where they would show a little button when a site had a feed. When clicked, the site’s feed would get added to the user’s RSS reader, which was built-in to the browser.

The intent of the rel = "feed" syntax was to allow Autodiscovery of <link>s that were syndication feeds, but that had non-obvious MIME types.

From whatwg’s blog post announcing the feature:

“For example, hAtom uses regular HTML with the MIME type text/html, yet may still be used as a syndication feed format.”

Alas, it never got widely adopted, maybe partially because rel="alternate" worked fine, and maybe because Chrome never implemented Autodiscovery. Whatwg removed it in 2009, only three years later.

Still, it’s an interesting glimpse into a past not so very long ago where RSS got serious attention in the Web Standards space.

I long for the world where RSS stayed in the mainstream, instead of being buried by the enshittified, algorithm-driven, profit-mad social media feeds we’re all addicted to now.

But, hey, if we try hard enough, maybe we can still make that world. Maybe they tried to bury RSS, not knowing it was an indieweb seed :)