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The ‘feed://’ Users – Java Only

Jon Evans asked me in this post on "the 'feed://' protocol" what browsers were misunderstanding the "feed:/" prefix. It turns out none of them are: the feed protocol seems to be misunderstood by feed readers written in Java.

Every attempt (and there were a few hundred since I disabled the RedirectMatch) to access http://nslog.com/feed://nslog.com/comments.rss or http://nslog.com/feed://nslog.com/index.rss came from either a browser with an of either Java/1.5.0_04 or Java/1.4.1_04.

Incidentally, search engines still enjoyed visiting my old category archives (at /archives/cat_name.php), so a new RedirectMatch has made it into my .htaccess file:

RedirectMatch /archives/cat_(.*).php http://nslog.com/$1/

One Response to "The ‘feed://’ Users – Java Only"

  1. This is why I think calling http something else is bad. It needlessly breaks existing software that uses http (which is a lot of software).