Emacs Gnus Bug: Broken Atom Webfeed Relative Link

By Xah Lee. Date: 2014-07-18. Last updated: 2014-12-10.

Gnus's RSS feature has 2 major problems:

Does not support Atom feed.
Does not support relative links in Atom feed when the feed is converted to RSS.

in Atom feed (aka webfeed, RSS), by spec one can have a base URL where other URL are relative to. Example

<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xml:base="http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/">

And if xml:base doesn't exist, relative link should resolve to current file path, just like HTML. This is required by spec, see: Atom Webfeed Tutorial

Many webfeed/rss readers are broken about it. If you are using such RSS reader, you get broken links for all relative links in the feed.

Emacs Webfeed Readers

I recommend Christopher Wellons's feed reader elfeed , at [2014-12-10 https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed ]

Atom feed format is superior than RSS. See: [Atom vs. RSS 2013-09-23 By Christopher Wellons. At http://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/ , accessed on 2014-12-10 ]

discussion at Google Plus ~~https://plus.google.com/+XahLee/posts/5JrhNjhtXRT~~