Paul Hoffman wrote:
At 11:59 PM -0400 4/3/05, Robert Sayre wrote:
If none of them are MUST, there is no social recourse when tracking down problems or seeking social understanding. Where did this feed come from? Who makes alternates? What's this all about?
Good, we're making progress.
Not really. We get to design our protocol, and we know the type of software that will be consuming a large part of the traffic. All of that software expects a feed-level link. There are use cases where that's awkward, but I can't believe people want to put these out on the open Internet without an alternate.
You're aiming at the "to limit behavior which has potential for causing harm" part of 2119.
I'm fine with making one of them a MUST for that reason. atom:id seems like the one that would most help tracking down problems, yes?
Nope. That could very well be a non-heirarchical scheme like urn:uuid. This is not necessarily about full-on buggy software. Making atom:id mandatory does seem low-cost; if the producer can't do it once, they'll never do it for the entries. There are lots of situations where the software is behaving correctly but the content is confusing to the end-user. Feed-level links help to resolve that confusion. Without the link, non-bugs become a problem.
Robert Sayre
