On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 21:39:34 -0500, Sam Ruby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
There are now, by some counts, ten versions of formats that call themselves RSS. Every last one of then has a required channel/link. Every last one of them.
Yes.
Relaxing a restriction requires consumers to handle more cases.
How much does it cost for consumers to handle these cases compared to how much it restricts the producers? With this restriction, all Atom feeds needs to be a copy of another resource type. It can never be a first class resource. I think feed level alternative links are useful, but not more than that they need to be a SHOULD, not MUST.
Because of this, I would like to request that there be a compelling use case be found which for feeds for which there can not be a atom:link defined.
I would much rather require 'rel="self"' than 'rel="alternate"'. The former doesn't require anyone to double-produce anything, while the latter almost always requires people to have some kind of HTML representation of their feed lying around somewhere. If all the consumer and producer's interested in is the Atom feed, why would one need a secondary resource that the feed can point to?
I cannot understand why the alternative HTML page is needed. If people mystically and by mere coincidence subscribe to a feed without an alternate resource in their aggregator, how can this hurt anyone? The will be subscribed, have all the entries show up in their aggregators, but not be able to view the feed in another format.
Note atom:link is defined as a URI. While most examples that we have seen use the HTTP scheme, this is not a requirement.
No, but we've also seen that most other schemes are totally useless in practice. What should an aggregator do with a 'news' scheme, for instance? What about 'prospero'? What about proprietary schemes that aren't registered in IANA and only retreivable through some sort of direct TCP socket? We have lots of these inside the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation; we are an old publisher and broadcaster.
I do not see why we (or anyone else) should be required to publish all the content we wish to syndicate to users, other companies and such, in alternative formats to Atom, just because the Atom specificatino requires it. If we don't do it to please our users, I don't see why we should do it at all. Just to comply with a specification is imho not a good enough reason.
-- Asbjørn Ulsberg -=|=- http://virtuelvis.com/quark/ «He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»
