Tom Insam

Irritating RSS feed links

A side-effect of all this Google Social lunacy is that I'm seeing a lot of URLs for people that I wouldn't normally have put in their Address Book entries. For instance, Simon Wistow's Vox page links to his gestalt page which in turn links to his use.perl page, so I see all of these URLs in Shelf. It fetches the pages, and discovers that there's a single RSS feed advertised on the use.perl page - http://use.perl.org/index.rss. But this RSS feed is nothing to do with Simon's page - it's the main use.perl article feed. Shelf doesn't know this, of course, so Simon's display in my Shelf window contains all recent use.perl articles.

The HTML spec seems to imply to me that rel="alternate" links are for linking to the same content, but represented in a different way, not some completely unrelated content that happens to be hosted on the same domain. This is very annoying.

I'm picking on use.perl unreasonably here, of course. Lots of people do it. use.perl is just the first one I noticed. Followed by search.cpan.org (author modules pages have an RSS feed of the master module upload list). But there are others.