Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by john111 3498 days ago
>To get an RSS feed of a single channel’s uploads, paste the channel URL into your RSS reader.

How does this work? How does the feed-reader know to grab the RSS XML instead of the page HTML, if they have the same URL?

2 comments

The RSS reader just looks for the,

   <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="yourfeed.rss" /> 
tag(s) in the head of your document. So for example, my channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/leaddadaist

Here's the tag in the source,

    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCnQRp2dhO1SIp9--CSPmYpQ">
In Firefox, there is an option to customise the toolbar by adding a '(RSS) Subscribe' button to it. This becomes active when Firefox detects that a web page has an accompanying RSS feed. Clicking on it either brings you to the RSS feed directly or give you subscription options if multiple RSS/Atom feeds are found for the web page.