[advocacy] Contacting Blogger (was Re: [uf-discuss] Rel-tag issues...)

[James Craig]

On Feb 12, 2007, at 7:37 AM, Mike Kaply wrote:

> On 2/11/07, Kevin Marks <kevinmarks at mac.com> wrote:
>>
>> Try making a fresh post, or republishing that one. This may be a
>> blogger issue with publishing via ftp?
>
> When I debugged this problem, that is exactly what I discovered. It is
> only broke when you publish via FTP. It is not broke when you are
> hosted by blogger.
>
> I switched to WordPress because of this problem.

Exactly. But this is not a problem with Blogger, this is a solution  
to a larger, more practical problem than rel-tag. The Blogger  
developers have to support plain-old web hosts without modification  
of the server config; a link URL to a restful tag space is not going  
to work on most simple web hosts. The Blogger developers know this  
and have to append .html onto the files they publish. The fact that  
the Blogger developers cannot implement to spec–or would need an even  
hackier workaround* in order to implement the rel-tag spec–is  
indicative of a problem with the spec.

I'm not saying we all need to agree to the solution, I'm merely  
suggesting that it's either naive or arrogant to defiantly deny there  
is a problem.

Cheers,
James

PS. The hackier workaround for Blogger; feel free to forward to your  
contacts there if you think this is a viable solution (I don't):  
myURL.com links tagspace to blogger redirect site like so:  
blogger.com/tags/redirect/siteID/tagspace with a 301 to back to the  
actual tagspace on the hosted site.

myURL.com links to:
<a rel="tag" href="http://blogger.com/tagredirect/mySiteId/foo">foo</a>
http://blogger.com/tagredirect/mySiteId/foo responds with a 301  
(moved perm) to
http://myURL.com/labels/foo.html

Though this is a "solution" (finger quotes emphasized), I hope the  
ridiculousness of it hammers home our point that there is a problem  
with the rel-tag spec.