Favicon in RSS feeds

[Phyks]

Hi,

I'm currently working on an RSS reader, and it appears that Wordpress does not make use of the possibilities of the <image> tag available in the RSS 2.0 specification (​http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#optionalChannelElements, optional element on channel).

This would greatly ease the parsing of favicons, preventing from doing an extra request to get the favicon URL and clearly improving reactivity of the reader, if the address to the favicon could be put in the RSS field.

I saw some issues about this on wordpress forums:
​http://wordpress.org/support/topic/favicon-rss
​http://wordpress.org/support/topic/where-do-i-put-favicon-to-show-up-in-rss-feeds

Maybe I missed something and it is included in wordpress, but I did not see it in any wordpress site I visited. However, I do not know wordpress enough to know if such a behaviour is hard to implement or not in Wordpress… =(

Thanks !

[stevenkword]

The element isn't necessarily Favicon-specific, but I would like to see feed channel image support. Should this be handled by ​Theme Features in the same manner as ​Header Images? Since this element is optional in the RSS specification, this might be a good way to provide conditional support. I'm going to do some research on how many feed aggregators support this element. Thoughts?

[Phyks]

I don't know exactly how many feed agregators potentially support this. I know some of them who try to respect and implement nicely the spec, and should support this I think.

I think it's not a key feature, but this might not be much work to implement it and it could be worth it. I don't know much of wordpress however, and don't have any specific ideas about the best way to implement it.

[stevenkword]

I've done some research and what I'm finding is that a large number of the free feed aggregators are not supporting the <image> sub-element and instead choose to go in favor of displaying the standard favicon out of the site root.

On the flip side of that, many non-WordPress syndicators are generating the tag including, Reddit, Trac, Huffington Post, Wikipedia, NY Times, etc. I'm wondering if the fact that WordPress is not syndicating the value could in turn be causing lower adoption with the aggregators.

The call is going to come back to the cost benefit analysis. Publishers seem to be putting the sub-element out there, but not the readers are not consuming it. The question becomes "how useful would the feature be?".

This might be best handled by extending an existing Favicon plugin, or perhaps by rolling the feature into new plugin that would also generate the other optional sub-elements in the spec. If nothing else, starting with a plugin may be a good way to get started without having to land a feature that isn't terribly critical or widely adopted into Core.

[Phyks]

As you said, most of the big traffic websites already implement it but Wordpress did not. I think (but it's only a personnal opinion) that this could be leading to many free feed agregators simply ignoring it not to implement two different ways to find a favicon for a given feed.

However, it's part of the spec, so why not using it ? Plus it could make life easier for feed agregators to get a favicon (or better an image of the user choice) for feeds.

[stevenkword]

If this works for feeds, this is almost exactly what we are talking about. Perhaps we should contact the Jetpack team and discuss adding the image tag there. ​http://jetpack.me/support/site-icon/

[pento]

Thanks for the feature request, @Phyks!

I agree that this would be useful behaviour, but similar to favicons, it's outside the scope of what WordPress Core does. I've submitted a ​feature request to the Jetpack team, if you have another favicon plugin that you use, I recommend you contact the plugin author directly to discuss adding this feature.