Atom/RSS Reader Bug, Relative Link

By Xah Lee. Date: .

it's annoying, that lots ATOM/RSS readers don't understand relative link, and ignore xml:base. Resolving relative link is required by spec.

[see Atom Webfeed Tutorial]

Here's history

I just discovered bugs in rss aggregator in google.com, my.yahoo.com, my.msn.com .

For my.msn.com, it won't understand validated atom 1.

For google.com, it won't understand relative links unless you have xml:base in your atom.xml.

For yahoo.com, it won't understand relative links, period, regardless whether you have xml:base.

According to the Atom spec tools.ietf.org rfc4287 on relative links which defers to http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-5.1.1, a atom doc without explicit “xml:base” should take the base as the path the current URL. (just as with HTML files)

So, it seems to me google's behavior is wrong.

Google's feed reader fixed the relative link bug.

recently, Christopher Wellons's feed reader elfeed ([2014-12-10 https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed ]) also had this problem. (See bug [2014-12-10 https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed/issues/37 ]) It has been fixed since.

a mastodon bot for emacs feed, have this bug.

rss reader relative link bug 2018-09-06 e79a4
rss reader relative link bug 2018-09-06