On 5 May 2005, at 6:23 pm, Robert Sayre wrote:
It would be deeply bogus to accept a Pace whose sole action was to remove a normative requirement, and simultaneously accept a Pace that puts it back in. Seems obvious to me.
Not really. Assuming PaceOptionalSummary is accepted, there are two completely valid outcomes:
1. PaceTextShouldBeProvided rejected => summaries are not required, and textual content is not encouraged
2. PaceTextShouldBeProvided accepted => summaries are not required, but textual content is encouraged
I don't see a conflict there. What's wrong with accepting two similar paces because one corrects the flaws in the other?
We know exactly what issues optional content has, because all of the other formats have it.
Yes, and we don't like it. A basic title only feed gives you fuck all to work with - it displays poorly when mixed with rich-content feeds, it isn't searchable because there aren't many keywords in the title, etc etc. They cause all sorts of problems.
So, we're looking for some way to say "provide as much information as you can." The problem with saying SHOULD is that we purport to know how much information the publisher can provide. It would be very easy to explain this issue in the spec, and I have no objection to doing so.
SHOULD here means "must unless you absolutely can't". That seems like a perfectly dandy explanation of the intention of encouraging high quality feeds.
Graham
