There is no standard mime type for RSS feeds

The lack of a standardized RSS mime type causes many inconsistencies when parsing RSS feeds, which unnecessarily raises the barrier of entry to develop new RSS readers and applications.

Up until now, the application/rss+xml mime type has been widely used when serving RSS feeds and application/atom+xml for Atom feeds, as recommended by the W3C Feed Validation Service. Other times, RSS feeds are served as text/xml or plaintext using the text/html.

Fortunately, most browsers, clients, and parsers have gracefully handled this inconsistency to remain compatible with the largest amount of RSS feeds and give their users the best possible experience. But having to add and maintain code to deal with the inconsistencies isn't sustainable since the code isn't guaranteed to work as new RSS feeds are being served in the future.

Attempts to standardize the application/rss+xml mime type have been proposed to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Mark Nottingham proposed the draft-nottingham-rss-media-type-00 and the RSS Board proposed draft-rss-media-type-00. But both have since expired.

This issue serves to document our efforts to push for a standardized mime type for RSS feeds and Atom feeds.