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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en"> <head>  <script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-J80V1HPMKT"></script> <script> window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'G-J80V1HPMKT'); </script> <title>RSS Autodiscovery</title> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS Advisory Board" href="http://feeds.rssboard.org/rssboard" /> <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com"> <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin> <link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Anton&family=Lisu+Bosa:wght@700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.4.1/css/bootstrap.min.css" integrity="sha384-Vkoo8x4CGsO3+Hhxv8T/Q5PaXtkKtu6ug5TOeNV6gBiFeWPGFN9MuhOf23Q9Ifjh" crossorigin="anonymous"> <style type="text/css" media="screen"> @import url("https://www.rssboard.org/images/stylesheet.css"); </style> <style type="text/css" media="screen"> @import url("https://www.rssboard.org/images/spec-stylesheet.css"); </style> <meta name="robots" content="noodp" /><link rel="canonical" href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery" /> </head> <body>   <div class="container page"> <div class="row"> <div class="col col-md-12 banner"> <h1 class="bannerhead"><a href="/">RSS Advisory Board</a></h1> <h2 class="bannersubhead">Really Simple Syndication specifications, tutorials and discussion</h2> </div> </div> <div class="row"> <div class="col col-md-10"> <div align="center"> <p><script type="text/javascript"> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script></p> </div>  <div class="specification"> <h3>RSS Autodiscovery</h3> <p class="fineprint">Editor's Note: This is version 1.0 of this document, published Nov. 27, 2006. <h4 id="introduction">1. <a href="#introduction">Introduction</a></h4> <p>RSS autodiscovery is a technique that makes it possible for browsers and other software to automatically find a site's RSS feed, whether it's in <a href="http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/">RSS 1.0</a> or <a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification">RSS 2.0</a> format. <p>Supported by Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 and other browsers, autodiscovery has become the best way to inform users that a web site offers a syndication feed. When a browser loads a page and discovers that a feed is available, Firefox and Internet Explorer display the common feed icon in the address bar. <p align="center"><img src="https://www.rssboard.org/images/rss-autodiscovery-address-bar.gif" width="556" height="28" alt="Firefox address bar of page with RSS feed identified using RSS Autodiscovery"> <p>Users can click the icon to subscribe with the browser's RSS reader or the user's preferred reader. Web publishers who offer feeds reach a wider potential audience with autodiscovery. <p>This specification describes how web publishers can support autodiscovery by adding an HTML header to web pages. <h4 id="conventions">2. <a href="#conventions">Conventions</a></h4> <p>In this documentation, the key words <span class="rfc2119">may</span>, <span class="rfc2119">must</span>, <span class="rfc2119">must not</span>, <span class="rfc2119">optional</span>, <span class="rfc2119">recommended</span>, <span class="rfc2119">required</span>, <span class="rfc2119">shall</span>, <span class="rfc2119">shall not</span>, <span class="rfc2119">should</span> and <span class="rfc2119">should not</span> are to be interpreted as described in <a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt">RFC 2119</a>. <h4 id="element-link">3. <a href="#element-link">link Element</a></h4> <p>Autodiscovery employs the <span class="element">link</span> element from <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.3">HTML</a> and <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/REC-xhtml1-20020801/">XHTML</a> to identify a site's syndication feed. The link <span class="rfc2119">must</span> be placed within a web page's <span class="element">head</span> element to establish a relationship between the page and another document. <p>To support autodiscovery, a <span class="element">link</span> element <span class="rfc2119">must</span> be added to the header, as shown in this HTML markup from <a href="http://www.kbcafe.com/rss">The RSS Blog</a>: <p class="example"><html><br>   <head><br>     <title>The RSS Blog</title><br>     <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS"<br>       href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheRssBlog"><br>   </head><br>   <body><br>     <br>   </body><br> </html> <p>The link can be placed within the header of the site's home page, individual pages such as weblog entries and any other page where a user might want to know that a feed's available. A <span class="element">head</span> <span class="rfc2119">may</span> include more than one autodiscovery link, but each <span class="rfc2119">must</span> identify a different feed. <p>To make the RSS subscription process simple for inexperienced users, publishers <span class="rfc2119">should</span> include only one autodiscovery link per page, using it to identify a site's main feed. <p>If you decide to include more than one autodiscovery link, the first link <span class="rfc2119">should</span> be the site's main feed. <p>Publishers who offer the same feed content in several syndication formats <span class="rfc2119">should not</span> use autodiscovery links for all of them. Choosing only one feed format for autodiscovery makes it easier on new subscribers, especially if they are unfamiliar with syndication and can't distinguish between the Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 formats. <p>The <span class="element">link</span> element <span class="rfc2119">must</span> have three attributes that describe the relationship: <span class="attribute">href</span>, <span class="attribute">rel</span> and <span class="attribute">type</span> and <span class="rfc2119">may</span> have a <span class="attribute">title</span> attribute. <p>Because attribute names <span class="rfc2119">must</span> be lowercase in XHTML, autodiscovery link attributes <span class="rfc2119">should</span> have lowercase names in HTML as well. <h4 id="element-link-href">3.1. <a href="#element-link-href">href Attribute</a></h4> <p>The <span class="attribute">href</span> attribute <span class="rfc2119">must</span> be the feed's URL. This can be a relative URL in pages that include a <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.4">base</a> element in the header. <p class="example"><head><br>   <title>RSS Advisory Board</title><br>   <base href="https://www.rssboard.org/"><br>   <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="rss-feed"><br> </head><br> <p>Because some software might not check for a base URL in relation to autodiscovery links, publishers <span class="rfc2119">should</span> identify feeds with full URLs. When an autodiscovery link is relative and no base URL has been provided, clients <span class="rfc2119">should</span> treat the web page's URL as the base. <h4 id="element-link-rel">3.2. <a href="#element-link-rel">rel Attribute</a></h4> <p>The <span class="attribute">rel</span> attribute <span class="rfc2119">must</span> have a value of "alternate", a keyword that indicates the link is an alternate version of the site's main content. <p>Although for purposes other than autodiscovery this attribute <span class="rfc2119">may</span> contain multiple keywords separated by spaces, in an autodiscovery link, the value <span class="rfc2119">must not</span> contain keywords other than "alternate". <p>Additionally, though <span class="attribute">rel</span> keywords are case-insensitive elsewhere, "alternate" <span class="rfc2119">must</span> be lowercase. <h4 id="element-link-title">3.4. <a href="#element-link-title">title Attribute</a></h4> <p>The <span class="attribute">title</span> attribute, when present, contains be a short, human-readable label such as the site's name or the feed's name. When a page contains more than one autodiscovery link, the title enables users to differentiate between the feeds, as demonstrated by Om Malik's <a href="http://www.gigaom.com/">GigaOM</a> site. <p align="center"><img src="https://www.rssboard.org/images/rss-autodiscovery-multiple-links.gif" width="622" height="272" alt="Firefox address bar of page with multiple RSS feeds identified using RSS Autodiscovery"> <p>Each autodiscovery link has a different title, which Mozilla Firefox displays in a drop-down menu when a user clicks the common feed icon. <h4 id="element-link-type">3.3. <a href="#element-link-type">type Attribute</a></h4> <p>The <span class="attribute">type</span> attribute <span class="rfc2119">must</span> contain the feed's MIME type, which is "application/rss+xml" for RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 feeds. <p>Although <span class="attribute">type</span> values are case-insensitive for other HTML and XHTML links, the value <span class="rfc2119">must</span> be lowercase for autodiscovery. <h4 id="credits">3. <a href="#credits">Credits</a></h4> <p>Rogers Cadenhead, James Holderness and Randy Charles Morin contributed to this document. Comments and corrections regarding this document are encouraged on the <a href="https://groups.google.com/g/rss-public">RSS-Public</a> mailing list. <h4 id="license">4. <a href="#license">License</a></h4> <div class="media cclicense"> <div class="media-left media-middle cclogo"> <p><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/" rel="nofollow"><img class="pull-left" src="https://www.rssboard.org/images/creative-commons-logo.gif" /></a></p> </div> <div class="media-body ccfineprint"> <p>Copyright 2025 RSS Advisory Board. This document titled RSS Autodiscovery is authored by the <a href="https://www.rssboard.org/">RSS Advisory Board</a>, published at the URL <a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery">https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery</a> and shared under the terms of the Creative Commons <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/" rel="nofollow">Attribution/Share Alike</a> license.</p> </div> </div> </div>  </div> <div class="col col-md-2 sidebar">  <p class="text-center"> <a href="/"><img src="/images/rss-feed-icon-96-by-96.png" width="96" alt="RSS icon" class="img-fluid"></a> </p> <div class="sidebargroup"> <div class="sidebartitle">Main Menu</div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/">RSS Advisory Board</a></div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification">RSS Specification</a></div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile">RSS Profile</a></div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-validator/">RSS Validator</a></div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery">RSS Autodiscovery</a></div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/advisory-board">Board Members</a></div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/charter" rel="nofollow">Charter</a></div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://groups.google.com/g/rss-public">RSS-Public Mailing List</a></div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-language-codes">RSS Language Codes</a></div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rsscloud-interface">RSSCloud Interface</a></div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-history">RSS History</a></div> </div> <div class="sidebargroup"> <div class="sidebartitle">RSS Feeds</div> <div class="sidebarrsslink"><a href="http://feeds.rssboard.org/rssboard" rel=\"nofollow\"><img src="/images/rss-icon.png" alt="Subscribe to Really Simple Syndication" border="0" width="16" height="16" /></a> <a href="http://feeds.rssboard.org/rssboard" rel=\"nofollow\">This Weblog</a></div> </div> <div class="sidebargroup"> <div class="sidebartitle">Social Media</div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a rel="me" href="https://mastodon.social/@rssboard">Mastodon</a></div> </div> <div class="sidebargroup"> <div class="sidebartitle">Spec Library</div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification">RSS 2.0 (Current)</a></div><div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-2-0">RSS 2.0</a></div><div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-0-9-2">RSS 0.92</a></div><div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-0-9-1">RSS 0.91</a> (UserLand)</div><div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-0-9-1-netscape">RSS 0.91</a> (Netscape)</div><div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-0-9-0">RSS 0.90</a></div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-change-notes">RSS Change Notes</a></div> </div> <div class="sidebargroup"> <div class="sidebartitle">Namespaces</div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/creative-commons">Creative Commons</a></div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/media-rss">Media RSS</a></div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/trackback">Trackback</a></div> </div> <div class="sidebargroup"> <div class="sidebartitle">Archive</div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/site-index" rel="nofollow">Site Index</a></div> </div> <div class="sidebargroup"> <div class="sidebartitle">Board Members</div> <div class="sidebarlink">Rogers Cadenhead</div> <div class="sidebarlink">Sterling "Chip" Camden</div> <div class="sidebarlink">Simone Carletti</div> <div class="sidebarlink">James Holderness</div> <div class="sidebarlink">Jenny Levine</div> <div class="sidebarlink">Eric Lunt</div> <div class="sidebarlink">Randy Charles Morin</div> <div class="sidebarlink">Ryan Parman</div> <div class="sidebarlink">Jake Savin</div> <div class="sidebarlink">Jason Shellen</div> <div class="sidebarlink">Paul Querna</div> </div> <div class="sidebargroup"> <div class="sidebartitle">Other Formats</div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4287" rel="nofollow">Atom</a></div> <div class="sidebarlink"><a href="http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/" rel="nofollow">RDF Site Summary</a></div> </div>  </div> </div> <div class="row top10header"> <div class="col"> <h2 class="top10">Popular Pages on This Site</h2> </div> </div> <div class="row"> <div class="col"> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-validator/">RSS Validator</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/media-rss">Media RSS Specification (Current)</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification">RSS 2.0 Specification</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile">RSS Best Practices Profile</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/redirect-rss-feed">How to Redirect an RSS Feed</a></li> </ul> </div> <div class="col"> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-language-codes">RSS Language Codes</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-enclosures-use-case">Payloads for RSS</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-encoding-examples">RSS Encoding Examples</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery">RSS Autodiscovery</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.rssboard.org/news/212/read-rss-feed-php-using">How to Read an RSS Feed with PHP Using SimplePie</a></li> </ul> </div> </div></div>  <div class="footer"> <p><a href="/">RSS Advisory Board</a> | <a href="http://feeds.rssboard.org/rssboard">RSS Feed</a> | <a href="https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification">RSS Specification</a> | Hosted by <a href="https://workbench.cadenhead.org/">Workbench</a></p> </div> </div> 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