Kottke on Aggregators: You're Wrong!

(Sorry for the NY Post-style headline.)

Jason Kottke makes a very good observation: most aggregators are misusing the HTTP referer field. He notes that 6 of his top 10 refers are from aggregators. Doing a bit of digging through the specifications he notes:

The definition of referer from RFC 2616 on HTTP 1.1 seems relevant to the question. It states that The Referer[sic] request-header field allows the client to specify, for the server's benefit, the address (URI) of the resource from which the Request-URI was obtained and that the Referer field MUST NOT be sent if the Request-URI was obtained from a source that does not have its own URI.

Good work. I have found this annoying and now I have a reason to complain. (For the record my RSS plugin does no such thing.)