Tim Bray wrote:
On Apr 9, 2005, at 4:26 PM, Graham wrote:
No one agrees with you Robert. Quit it.
Well, Robert has not actually favored us with a single clear sentence expressing his point, so I'll try:
The 10th bullet point of section 4.1.2 should read:
atom:entry elements MUST contain an atom:summary element in either of the following cases:
* the atom:entry contains an atom:content that has a "src" attribute
(and is thus empty).
* the atom:entry contains content that is encoded in Base64; i.e.
the "type" attribute of atom:content is a MIME media type
[RFC2045] and does not begin with "text/" nor end with "+xml"."The requirement on accessibility grounds for a required <atom:summary> is superfluous, because we have <atom:title> and one required text field is enough.">
On balance, I would still lean to encouraging the use of <summary/> because I do feel that content-ful feeds are intrinsincally better than link feeds; but only really at a +/- 0 level.
Are legions of people complaining about del.icio.us and craigslist? Should we use our spec to imply publishers must provide text?
An app would handle an empty content element the same way it would an absent one. Thus, the current spec is concerned with advocacy, not interop.
That is to say, Rob's position is not that radical or unreasonable. On the other hand, I tend to agree with Sam on the subject of Rob's rhetorical techniques.
Yes, well, what did it take to get the subject addressed in a technical manner? I've tried a variety of rhetorical techniques.
At the moment, my best judgment of rough consensus would read that most people want to retain the <atom:summary> requirement, but it's clearly not the case that no one agrees with Robert.
RFC 2822: Optional body RSS 0.90: Required title, Required link, No description RSS 0.91: Required title, Required link, Optional description RSS 0.92: Optional title, Optional link, Optional description RSS 1.0: Required title, Required link, Optional description RSS 2.0: Optional title, Optional link, Optional description Atom 0.3: Required title, Required link, Optional summary and content
Robert Sayre
