Autodiscovery is the general term applied to extracting useful metadata from a webpage, which is pointed out using an embedded <link/> tag in the document head.
Autodiscovery has been most prevalent in the RSS application area (see RSS Autodiscovery) where it has been used to allow surfers to automatically subscribe to a 'blogs feed in their favourite feed reader. The process relies on using a bookmarklet to walk-through the DOM of the current document and pick out the appropriate <link/> tag which points to the feed. The bookmarklet then redirects the browser to the web interface of the users feedreader.
The bookmarklet is able to determine the correct <link/> tag as the title,
rel, and type attributes are agreed within the relevant
community. For example an RSS autodiscovery link looks like the following:
<link rel="alternate" type='application/rss+xml' href='http://www.ldodds.com/blog/rss.rdf' />
While a FOAF autodiscovery link looks like this:
<link type='application/rdf+xml' title='FOAF' href='http://www.ldodds.com/webwho.xrdf' />
Continue reading about the link tag.
This micro-utility automatically generates a link tag, and accompanying bookmarklet from a description of the tag, and the desired target application. Simply fill in the form below and submit it to generate the code and link.