W3C on relative URL references in feeds

November 21, 2005 / Filed under: RSS, Services

Among a few errors present in my full posts RSS file, I noted an important one, regarding relative URL’s:

Some RSS elements are allowed to contain HTML, including links and images. However, if these links use relative URLs to point to resources, users of some news aggregators will not be able to click on them. And your images use the relative URLs, the images may not appear (since the news aggregator will be looking for the images locally on the user's hard drive, rather than on your web site).

I had mentioned this problem quite recently, and it’s nice to see the W3C follow up to my post (joke, yes).

In any event, on my blog - in the HTML output, I will leave relative links intact. But, in my RSS feeds, I’ll have to convert all relative URL’s to absolute, which should just be a simple find/replace approach.

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