[thelist] Linking to an RSS feed

[Noah St. Amand]

I'm trying to determine the best way to link to an RSS feed from an HTML 
page.

It seems that a link in the document header is a good idea, since that 
causes some browsers to display an RSS icon linked to the feed in the 
location field, e.g.:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" 
href="http://www.example.com/index.xml" />

I would also like to link to the feed from within the page. Some sites 
appear to use a "feed://" protocol (or pseudo-protocol), but I can't 
find enough information about this to determine whether or not it's good 
practice.

The alternative seems to be just to link to the feed with the "http://" 
protocol. This is what I've been doing to date, and works fine for 
people who know what they're doing, but I've now had two separate 
clients ask me why there was a page on their site called "This XML file 
does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The 
document tree is shown below."

Is one of these methods clearly better than the other? Are there other 
options that I'm not aware of?

Thanks for any info.

Cheers,
Noah