Pointers to ActivityStreams and RSS feeds missing

[kidehen]

Typically, especially across the Fediverse, a reader includes references to ActivityStreams and RSS feeds along the following lines, via entries in the section of its HTML doc. This common practice is currently missing from pinafore.

Fix:
Given a profile page denoted by the URL https://mastodon.social/users/kidehen, the following would be added to the section:

<link href='https://mastodon.social/users/kidehen' rel='alternate' type='application/rss+xml'>
<link href='https://mastodon.social/users/kidehen' rel='alternate' type='application/activity+json'>

[nolanlawson]

Thanks, this seems like a pretty simple addition. But what purpose does it serve? E.g. is there some browser extension or protocol handler that can hook into these <link>s?

[kidehen]

What I described is a standard auto-discovery pattern for RSS and Atom feeds used by a variety of compliant clients. Take a look your Mastodon profile page, and you will see the pattern in use there too.

There are tools that process RSS discovered by this easy-to-implement use of Plain Old Semantic HTML (POSH) :)

[kidehen]

Thanks, this seems like a pretty simple addition. But what purpose does it serve? E.g. is there some browser extension or protocol handler that can hook into these <link>s?

Regarding browser extensions, see our Structured Data Sniffer which is available for:

1. Chromium Browsers
2. Firefox
3. Safari
4. Github Repo

[nolanlawson]

I see, so this would allow the extension to allow a user who is on a profile page in Pinafore to quickly subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for the clarification!