The Internet saves a lot more on storage and bandwidth costs by not shipping an XSLT implementation with every browser than it does by allowing Joe's Blog to present XML as an index.
I have arduinos with sensors providing their measurements as XML, with an external XSLT stylesheet to make them user-friendly. The arduinos have 2KB RAM and 16 MIPS.
Which build process are you talking about? Which XSLT library would you recommend for running on microcontrollers?
No because then it would not be an Atom feed. Atom is a syndication format, the successor to RSS. I must provide users with a link to a valid Atom XML document, and I want them to see a web page when this link is clicked.
This is why so many people find this objectionable. If you want to have a basic blog, you need some HTML docments and and RSS/Atom feed. The technologies required to do this are HTML for the documents and XSLT to format the feed. Google is now removing one of those technologies, which makes it essentially impossible to serve a truly static website.
So put them on separate pages because they are separate protocols (HTML for the browser and XML for a feed reader), with a link on the HTML page to be copied and pasted into a feed reader.
It really feels like the developer has over-constrained the problem to work with browsers as they are right now in this context.
There are separate URLs for "https:" vs "http:" although they are usually the same content when both are available (although I have seen some where it isn't the same), although the compression (and some other stuff) is decided by headers. However, it might make sense to include some of these things optionally within the URL (within the authority section and/or scheme section somehow), for compression, version of the internet, version of the protocol, certificate pinning, etc, in a way that these things are easily delimited so that a program that understands this convention can ignore them. However, that might make a mess.
I had also defined a "hashed:" scheme for specifying the hash of the file that is referenced by the URL, and this is a scheme that includes another URL. (The "jar:" scheme is another one that also includes other URL, and is used for referencing files within a ZIP archive.)
> Would you also suggest I use separate URLs for HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1? Maybe for a gzipped response vs a raw response?
The difference between HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1 is exactly like the difference between plugging your PC in with a green cable or a red cable. The client neither knows nor cares.
> It's the same content, just supplied in a different format. It should be the same URL.
So what do I put as the URL of an MP3 and an Ogg of the same song? It's the same content, just supplied in a different format.
Then the server should supply the right format based on the `Accept` header, be it `application/rss+xml` or `application/atom+xml` or `text/xml` or `text/html`.
Even cheaper than shipping the client an XML and an XSLT is just shipping them the HTML the XSLT would output in the first place.