> The feedvalidator catches silly, boring corner-cases every day. > > I hesitate to bring it up again as it has proven to incite adhominen > attacks from within this workgroup, but we have an example of a > respected journalist who has published a book in which he specifically > called out this.
So? What does that have to do with interop? > > And we have the experience from RSS 2.0 (motto: everything is optional! > and extensible!) whereby Don Box introduced xhtml:body into his feed in > place of description, something that most aggregators support today. Yes, and he just might stick xaml:body in there next year. We can't stop him. > On the other hand, what we have is arguments that entries with empty > summaries is not possible with the current format - something that is > blatantly incorrect. Well, the argument was originally that people don't like title-only feeds, so we shouldn't even worry about them (see journalist point above). > > We also had a very complex and delicate negotiation a while back that > seems to have been forgotten. It is quite possible to produce feeds > with content that is base64 encoded binary or out of band. What is > desired in such circumstances is precisely akin to specifications that > require alt attributes for img tags. It atom's case, it is a summary. I've edited Tim's Pace to show what the resulting text would look like, since a summary would still be required in such circumstances. Hopefully, the resulting requirements are clear now. Robert Sayre
