How to enable automatic RSS feed detection in IE 7

Posted: (EET/GMT+2)

 

I've been playing lately with the Windows Vista (ex Longhorn) Beta 1, which also includes Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7).

This new browser version has a neat little feature for RSS enabled web sites: a tiny button lights up on the toolbar whenever a site supports RSS feeds.

The obvious question of course is how does IE 7 find that a site supports RSS. It does this by looking for some metadata inside the HTML document.

That is, if the HEAD section contains a tag like this, then the button will light up:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="Jani Järvinen's Personal Weblog"
href="http://www.saunalahti.fi/janij/blog/2005.xml">

The IE development team at Microsoft has also published a simple guide about these LINK tags.