HackGuelph.ca

As Juan Svaikauskas pointed out on the old blog, the new blog’s theme doesn’t include our RSS feeds within the visible HTML of the page.

Having said that, this site does support RSS autodiscovery. Many browsers will automatically find our RSS feeds and make them available via a small icon in the address bar. Or, that’s how it used to work.

Unfortunately, Chrome requires a browser extension for this. I’m not sure what their reasoning is for not including it by default, but I highly recommend installing that extension. It’s always the first thing I do after installing the browser.

Firefox 8 seems not to include the RSS icon in the address bar anymore. I was shocked to discover that it was moved to the bookmarks menu way back in Firefox 4! I really don’t understand this decision, and it would seem that many other people agree with me. In fact there are at least two extensions to bring the functionality back to users of Firefox 4+. (Edit: As Bob points out, in Firefox it is possible to add a “Subscribe” button without resorting to extensions. I would still prefer to see something like this in the default interface.)

And even though IE8 (and I think also IE7) had decent support for RSS autodiscovery, it looks like a default install of IE9 doesn’t. You need to enable the command bar or use a deeply hidden menu option. Neither is very appealing.

Sadly, Opera is the only major browser (yes, I consider it to be a major browser) that seems to ship with support for first-class RSS autodiscovery in its latest version. I’m not surprised that Opera does this right, but I am surprised that it stands alone.

I have a strong preference for autodiscovery. Things that the browser does well shouldn’t be repeated in HTML [see "RSS Is the Browser’s Responsibility" about halfway down]. But if people want to see a feed link within the page body itself, I’m happy to be overruled. What say you?