Comparison
How it compares
Syndication Manifest is not a replacement for feeds, OPML, or page-level autodiscovery. It is a small discovery layer for readers that need one predictable place to start.
Existing approaches
These approaches all solve real problems. The gap Syndication Manifest addresses is narrower: given a publication home page, let a reader fetch one JSON document that lists the public feeds the publisher wants to advertise.
| Approach | Works well for | Trade-offs | How Syndication Manifest differs |
|---|---|---|---|
HTML <head> autodiscovery | Advertising feeds related to a specific page. | Clients must fetch and parse HTML. Site-wide feed lists, collections, and external feeds are hard to express cleanly. | Starts at a site-level well-known URI and carries publisher-declared feed metadata in JSON. |
| Scraping visible links | Recovering feeds that publishers mention on pages but do not expose through autodiscovery. | Heuristic, fragile, and hard to distinguish from ordinary links. Readers have to guess publisher intent. | Makes the publisher's intended feed list explicit. |
| OPML | Exchanging subscription lists, outlines, and large feed catalogues. | Excellent as a portable list format, but less direct for typed JSON metadata, publisher identity, media types, and external-feed cautions. | Uses a compact JSON object designed for discovery before subscription, while still allowing large collections to be deferred. |
Dan Q's /.well-known/feeds | Publishing a site-level OPML list of feeds from a predictable well-known path. | Uses the clear feeds suffix and OPML representation. That prior work is one reason this proposal uses /.well-known/syndication instead. | Keeps respectful distance from that path, uses JSON, and defines publisher identity, feed media metadata, collections, and off-origin handling. |
| Feed Menus | A JSON menu of RSS and Atom feeds at /.well-known/feed-menu.json. | Useful and close in spirit, but currently centred on menu items with RSS and Atom links rather than a publication-level manifest. | Adds publication data, JSON Feed, media-type-first feed objects, collections, external feeds, and explicit authority guidance. |
| Schema.org Feed Data | Describing structured data feeds and tables of contents using Schema.org vocabulary. | Broader and more expressive than feed-reader discovery. It can reference RSS, Atom, and other data feeds, but is not limited to public subscription feeds. | Stays deliberately narrow: public RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, and similar syndication endpoints for feed readers. |
Design posture
- Keep
<head>links for page-specific alternates. - Keep OPML for importing, exporting, and exchanging subscription lists.
- Use Syndication Manifest when a reader needs a publisher-declared starting point.
- Allow clients to fall back to existing discovery methods when no manifest is present.