Change RssFeed mime-type to "application/xml"

[Arthur Koziel]

Currently the RssFeed class returns RSS feeds with "application/rss+xml" as the mime-type. However, "application/rss+xml" isn't a valid registered mime-type at the IANA (​http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/), so I'm proposing to change it to "application/xml" which seems to be widely used among other rss feeds.

Nice side effect: Firefox will highlight the XML properly when viewing its source, which makes debugging a little bit easier.

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

The current MIME type (rss+xml) is also commonly used for RSS feeds (RSS is a notoriously poorly specified "standard", so there are multiple content types used in practice). Yes, it didn't complete the IANA registration process for some reason, but it does conform to the RFC 3023 pattern. It's also useful not to use the overly-general application/xml type so that browsers like Firefox, etc, can correctly dispatch to an external application, rather than falling back to internal processing for an RSS feed.

End of the day, the Feed Validator is happy with our chosen MIME type. It works well with browsers, in that they can detect a feed and dispatch to a feed reader instead of falling back to displaying the source (which is usually the wrong thing to do). It's also consistent with what a lot of other sites do. It's a little pointless to talk about Internet standards when it comes to RSS, since it generally plays poorly with them. We do as well as we can with an imperfect spec here. If you want good, accurate standards support, use Atom. It wouldn't be particularly productive to change the MIME type here in Django.

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Milestone post-1.0 deleted