On Tuesday, April 26, 2005, at 02:49 PM, Graham wrote:
So your app sends me an Atom document that looks like this:
<entry> <id>whetever</id> <title>So Caleb is Lindsey's father</title> </entry>
What does this mean?
a) A title only feed b) A full entry with the summary missing.
Without knowing this (which it wouldn't under Tim's proposal), my app can't reliably interoperate with yours.
What if you get this:
<entry> <id>whetever</id> <title>So Caleb is Lindsey's father</title> <summary>DNA testing has proven Caleb is Lindsey's father</summary> </entry>
What does this mean?
a) a title and summary only entry b) a full content entry with the content missing c) a summary and extension element entry with dc:modified missing etc. etc. etc.
As long as an entry meets the requirements of the spec, if an element isn't there, the consumer (unless it has some special out-of-band knowledge) has to assume that the entry is complete. If anything that the publisher intended to have there is missing, then their software has a bug or they've misconfigured it, and ensuring that their buggy or incorrectly configured software interoperates well is beyond the scope of the spec, is it not?
