Just the other day, after I have been posting about how IE7 automatically detects feeds I have found a link (
http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2005/08/03/446904.aspx) by the Longhorn RSS team at Microsoft which details some information about how IE7 detects feeds on a page.
Currently, beta 1 only supports RSS. Atom support is expected in later Beta's. For IE7 to detect a feed on your page the page must contain the a snippet of HTML similar to:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="your feed title here" href="http://www.company.com/feedurl.rss">
This will enable IE7 to auto discover the feed for the page. What IE7 will not do is to automatically show feeds that are linked to directly on a page. Furthermore, if the if the "type" attribute on the "Link" tag is "text/xml" (like it used to be on my page) IE7 Beta1 will not pick it up as a valid feed. I have no idea if this will be fixed in the next versions.
I would have liked it to display a notification of other feed links on a page, so that I can quickly subscribe to these. On my blog, related topics are given to the user via a link to an HTML page or via a link to a RSS feed. I would have liked it if some of these would be visible to the user via the feed notification button.
I have adjusted my blog to now indicate that it has a feed (thanks to the RSS teams blog article), however it still doesn't render in IE7 properly.
One thing to note about the RSS feed is that it is converted by 2RSS.com on the fly, so it will also include adverts in. Sorry about that.
