Bloggers: Read this before moving to https

RSS 2.0 was specced in '02, if I have my dates right.

The web world has changed a fair bit in 12 years.

That the spec demands a protocol is hardly surprising, and I do wish that most readers out there would allow other connection protocols, but as they mostly don't, offering a part of your website over HTTP seems the only option.

To mitigate: Statically generate your RSS on each change. (If you use something like Jekyll, a breeze, something like PHP, a pain in the ass).

In the long run?

We need RSS 3.0, as long as the big players don't compromise it or kill it, but instead adopt it.

RSS 2.0 does actually allow HTTPS URLs[1]. The author of the blog post appears to be misreading a StackOverflow comment which is specifically about <enclosure> elements, which are the only URLs that the RSS spec restricts to HTTP.

1: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification#comments

This is obviously an issue, but I feel like this is a situation where you should ignore that part of the spec or at worst offer an http-only alternate version. When the spec is dangerously out of date like this, there's no reason to fetishize compliance.

Concerning the link changes, couldn't the author have used the "//url.com" format in order to avoid this issue in the first place?