I haven’t been following to know whether the effort is still proceeding, blocked or abandoned.

Alternate. Alternative. The words are not always interchangeable as nouns or adjectives. The first means every other one in a series; the second, one of two possibilities. As the other of a series of two, an alternate may stand for “a substitute,” but an alternative, although used in a similar sense, connotes a matter of choice that is never present with alternate.

As the flooded road left them no alternative, they took the alternate route.

I can understand your confusion. The Wikipedia article “alternate” is now missing. Linking to a non-existent word in Wikipedia, as you suggest, proves nothing.

However, at the time this was originally posted, the Wikipedia article explained the prescriptivist view that “alternate” was not an alternative to “alternative”. It has since been deleted – probably for the reason you gave – it really belongs in Wiktionary.

Boo to not being able to make up my mind on the last two points.

Yay to making up my mind and removing technical info from feed titles, even if that means some people will see equivalent links twice.

Yay to OddThinking for now using application/xml where it used to use text/xml.

“Oh, what a shame” to the simple WordPress architecture and Auto-discovery headers not really getting along well.

Yay to Julian for waking up this morning with the realisation that there is a simple solution. You just need to run The_Loop twice per page – once for the autodiscovery links, and once for the contents of the post. Inefficient? Maybe, but who cares?

I now have a proof-of-concept up live – each page offers an auto-discoverable feed per post on the page, so you can subscribe to only the comments on a particular post.

Later, I would like to add similar autodiscovery links for category feeds and search feeds.