Recently there was a question asked on the RSS Bandit forums from a user who was Unable to Import RSSBandit-Exported OPML into IE7. The question goes
I exported my feeds from RSSBandit 1.3.0.42 to an OPML file in hopes of trying the feed support in IE7. IE7 seems to try to import, but ultimately tells me no feeds were imported. The exported file must have over a 100 feeds, so it's not that. Has anyone else been able to import feeds from RSSBandit into IE7?
I got an answer for why this is the case from the Internet Explorer's RSS team. The reason is provided in the the RSS Bandit bug report, Support type="rss" for export of feeds, where I found out that somewhere along the line someone came up with the convention of adding a type="rss" attribute to indicate which were the RSS feeds in an OPML file. The Internet Explorer RSS team has decided to enforce this convention for indicating RSS feeds in an OPML file and will ignore entries that don't have this annotation.
type="rss"
Since RSS Bandit supports both RSS/Atom feeds and USENET newsgroups, I can see the need to be able to differentiate which are the feeds in an OPML file without having applications probe each URL. However I do think that type="rss" is a misnomer since it should also apply to Atom feeds. Perhaps type="feed" instead?
type="feed"