h-feed

h-feed is a microformats2 experiment with a top level feed object to contain h-entry posts. It is functionally a DRYer replacement for RSS/Atom feed files and thus could supersede them.

How

How to markup

Mark up your

index page with class="h-feed" (e.g. on the <html> or <body>)
its top level <h1> with class="p-name"
- if it links to the index (itself) then class="u-url" on that hyperlink
- otherwise if you lack any top level links, this works: <a class="u-url" href="/"></a>
markup the h-card you already have on your index page with class="p-author"
and add class="u-photo" on the representative photo of your index page (e.g. banner etc.), or leave it out and let consumers imply/use the u-photo of the p-author h-card you marked up in the previous step

How to test

Feeds marked up with h-feed should work in the same way as simple lists of h-entries. See How to Test Feeds.

How to consume

See How to Consume Feeds

Why

So indie readers who subscribe to your site can display:

a name (and icon) for your site/feed in a list
authorship of the feed
multiple feeds from a page (less common)

WordPress and HFeed

A large percentage of WordPress themes use hfeed on every page, as opposed to only on pages with multiple hentrys. Due to the popularity of WordPress, this is present on a large number of websites.

IndieWeb Examples

IndieWeb community members that support h-feed:

Tantek

Tantek Çelik supports h-feed on his tantek.com home page using an index.html template and Falcon since 2012-07-16, at Sandeep Shetty's encouragement, to help with the indie reader he is building.

Shane Becker

Shane Becker supports h-feed on his veganstraightedge.com home page using for his composite feed of posts and on each post-type specific feed (/notes, /articles, /bookmarks, /videos, /notes) since 2012-11-18 (private repo). He previously supported just hfeed on his feeds since 2010-06-04 (private repo).

Will Norris

Will Norris supports h-feed on his willnorris.com home page since mid-2013 using WordPress and a modified version of wordpress-uf2 (modifications to be sent upstream at soonish?)

Kevin Marks

Kevin Marks has had an h-feed on kevinmarks.com since 2013-12-10 and of course has one on known.kevinmarks.com, like all known sites.

Barnaby Walters

Barnaby Walters supports h-feed on his waterpigs.co.uk home page since 2014-01-21

h-feed to atom gateway

Jeena

Jeena supports h-feed for his blog posts and notes on https://jeena.net since 2014-02-25

Tom Morris

Tom Morris supports h-feed for posts on tommorris.org since 2014-02-25.

Bear

bear supports h-feed for his blog posts at https://bear.im/bearlog since 2014-07-25. Feed discovery is lacking and needs to be added to his home page.

Pelle Wessman

Pelle Wessman supports h-feed for his blog posts, archive, bookmarks and interactions at http://voxpelli.com/ since 2014-09-07. For blog posts only partial content with titles only – for bookmarks and interactions full content.

gRegor Morrill

gRegor Morrill supports h-feed for notes at http://gregorlove.com/notes/ since 2014-??-??.

Since this feed is not on the homepage, the navigation link to the notes uses rel="feed" for feed discovery.

Ben Roberts

Ben Roberts supports h-feed on his site's main page as well as all other post lists including type specific pages (/note, /photo , etc) and monthly archives. Feeds still need next/previous links, these will likely only be on a separate (primary) h-feed off the main page. The main page has had h-feed since March 2014 but was implemented to add h-feed to any post list type page in May 2015.

rhiaro

Amy Guy has h-feed on homepage and all pages which are a collection of her own posts (eg. rhiaro.co.uk/tag/indieweb, rhiaro.co.uk/travel, rhiaro.co.uk/2015, rhiaro.co.uk/likes) since 2015-02-??.

Plans to add rel=feed or something from homepage/side menu to discover different feeds.

Jonny Barnes

Template:jonnybarnes supports h-feed for notes at https://jonnybarnes.uk/notes since ?

Brainstorming

partial feeds

Partial (e.g. truncated) vs full h-feeds.

A lot of blogs have feeds with partial content, where the entries only have post names/titles, permalinks, and sometimes summaries but not full post content. This could be done for UX reasons where the reader is not subjected to a full long post but a quick list of shorter summaries.

If you do have a partial feed (e.g. on your home page), it is good (for indie reader consumption) to also have a separate full feed page.

The partial feed can use a u-uid u-url to link to the full feed page which could be discovered by a canonical h-feed discovery algorithm.

    <div class="h-feed" id="partial_feed">
        <h1 class="p-name">
         <a class="u-url" href="#partial_feed">Partial Feed</a></h1>
        <a class="u-uid u-url" href="/feed.html">Full Feed</a>
        <ol>
            <li class="h-entry"><a href="permalink1">Article1 name</a></li>
            <li class="h-entry"><a href="permalink2">Article2 name</a></li>
        </ol>
    </div>

design freedom

The possibility of separate partial vs full feeds provides more design freedom for content publishers, since they can choose to have a full or partial (or no!) feed on their homepage and thus design accordingly.

acegiak: KartikPrabhu: my wife's site (which I'm helping her add microformats etc to) is a potential test for this because she's an artist and wants her landing page to be quite specific in appearance.

from: http://indiewebcamp.com/irc/2014-03-27/line/1395970560

canonical feed autodiscovery

prior work

Feed readers discover the links to legacy RSS/Atom feed files automatically from HTML pages by parsing for links with rel="alternate" and type="application/rss+xml" or type="application/atom+xml" respectively.

When such links use the <link> tag in the <head> of the page, this provides the potential for a nice UX where the user does not need to know about the 'plumbing' of feeds / feed files.

Example from adactio.com in Feedly

autodiscovery feed example from adactio.com

How can (possibly multiple) h-feed feeds be discovered similarly?

rel feed

Link to h-feed marked-up html pages from the home page using rel="feed" with type="text/html" and an optional title=""Feed Title". Also, suggested to have rel="feed alternate". See also rel-feed.

url uid

Alternatively, if an h-feed has a u-url u-uid property that is not the URL of the current page itself, then that u-url u-uid URL can be treated as the canonical full feed.

Articles

"IndieWeb: fragment subscriptions to microformats" on Superfeedr.

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