From the mailbags this morning, I got the following bug report:

You have two broken links to subscribe to RSS feeds. In both cases, my browser tries to open/save to my desktop rather than open the rss feed in a browser window.

My response, though nothing new, I thought some might find interesting, at least for future reference.

“We return our feeds with the correct MIME type for the syndication format. In the case of RSS 2.0 that would be application/rss+xml, per RFC 3023.

“This is important because it means your browser should able to use this information to determine the file format and launch the appropriate helper program or plugin (e.g. a newsreader) to read the file. We realize in practice this may not be the case. Internet Explorer has not been revised in over 4 years and Firefox requires some additional configuration in order to display application/rss+xml files in the browser (but the latter can be done).

“Some people advocate sending RSS feeds out with a more generic text/xml MIME type, which most browsers natively know how to parse and display. However, doing so would make it impossible for browsers (and more importantly, newsreaders) to know what sort of XML file you’re downloading and what helper application to load.”

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.