Robert Sayre wrote:
I want the to know the precise technical reason for these requirements.
First, I'd like to ask a favor. Please wait 24 hours before replying to this email. In your zeal to filibuster on this particular topic, you have made a number of fallacious and personal attacks.
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From my point of view, we are approaching the problem from different ends. I am asking "why?", and you are asking "why not?".
I want predictability. I want a lack of surprises.
You apparently want generality.
If in the first 18 months of this email list, there were no messages to this list with a zero length body. In 99.9999% of the feeds I have seen, entries have a summary or content.
The few cases I have seen where there have been feeds which (briefly) have not had so much as a summary, there always has been a swift and clear response by the consuming public.
When I point that out, you take the opportunity to initiate an ad-hominen attack.
I would like to see a feed format in which conformance is not defined by mob justice, but instead (as much as humanly possible) can be determined by a dispassionate RNG schema and/or feedvalidator.
Also note that I said "messages to the list with a zero length body". I did not say "messages without a body". I am not an expert on SMTP, but don't believe it is possible to have an email message without a body... the closest one can come is to have a message with a zero length body.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't see anything in the spec that indicates that content can't be of zero length. Is that sufficient for your needs?
Finally, I remember the day when links disappeared from all Radio Userland feeds, to be replaced by guids. A core element replaced by another core element. As links were optional, there wasn't much anybody could say about this. I don't want this to happen to Atom. I want an aggregator author to be able to respond to "but why didn't you display my content" by pointing to an empty content (or summary) element and saying "I displayed what you told me to".
More succinctly: if people today view how a given aggregator as feeds without descriptions as a bug to be fixed, then one should either be able to identify one of the following as buggy: the feed, the aggregator, or the format itself. If the answer to this question is indeterminant, then interoperability suffers.
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I realize that none of these arguments are foolproof. Exceptions can be found. But I will assert that the cumulative effect of each of these arguments is compelling enough to me to rise to the level where I feel a question of "why?" is warranted. Why? What compelling use case would enabling the omission of non-remote, textual content - i.e., not merely providing a zero length content, but the outright omission of same - enable?
- Sam Ruby
