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First, anyone with a feed should care, and care a lot, about this. When IE7 begins to permeate to the average web user, feeds will begin to go mainstream. I see this as a sea change coming at us, and coming fast. In IE7 the "feed' icon will show an animated glow whenever there's a feed associated with the current page. So how does it know?
According to the Microsoft RSS team [blogs.msdn.com]:
Here is an example of RSS autodiscovery:<html>
<head>
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="your feed title here" href="http://www.company.com/feedurl.rss">
</head>
<body>
...We've also added support for ATOM autodiscovery in IE7 Beta 2 Preview:
<html>
<head>
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="your feed title here" href= "http://www.company.com/feedurl.xml">
</head>
<body>
...Put the title of your feed in the title attribute and the URL to the feed itself in the href attribute. And, you're done.
This "should" already be a best practice for sites offering a feed, but I spot checked a few of the feeds that I aggregate and a <link> element in the head is only there some of the time. iThe practice is far from universal.
With IE7 doing its auto-detect animation trick, now is the time to make sure all your feeds can be found.
