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Note:These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards. They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in Mozilla. My best suggestion (and you will thank me when surfing an ever-increasing number of sites on the web which have been crafted to use the new standards) is to upgrade to the latest version of your browser. If that's not possible, consider moving to the Standards-compliant and open-source Mozilla browser.

December 27, 2002

Feeds

I added a few more RSS feeds to this blog (and modified the existing ones a bit). You can now choose from a “plain-Jane” RSS 0.9.1 feed — a basic format, understood by all News Aggregators — or one of the “second generation” RSS feeds (RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0), which are extensible using XML namespaces.

There’s really not much difference between “1.0” and “2.0”, except for the egos of the developers involved. They look different — open them in your web browser and see — but they are functionally equivalent.

If your News Aggregator supports the additional data supplied by these feeds, you can use whichever one is convenient. Some clients, like NetNewsWire can actually make use of the full-content feed, which includes the full text content of the entries in this blog. You can subscribe to the “Full Content” version and read this blog in NetNewsWire, without ever opening your web browser.

I don’t actually recommend that, as the HTML rendering (especially of math formulae) is pretty lousy. And you can’t view or post comments. Generally, it’s a lot less useful.

There’s also the issue of bandwidth. The 0.91 feed is 5K. The 1.0 and 2.0 feeds are 12K and 10K, respectively. The RSS 2.0 Full Content feed is 36K. So, you see, one pays for the extra information.

I’d be interested in hearing back from subscribers to these feeds, about which format(s) their client software supports, and which features they would like added to the feed(s).

Posted by distler at December 27, 2002 1:38 AM

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More recently, I’ve added a “Recent Comments” feed.

Let’s see if it updates automatically, when I comment on an old post, like this one.

Posted by: Jacques Distler on February 22, 2003 5:12 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

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