On 7 May 2005, at 1:35 pm, Henry Story wrote:
My definition is making me wonder whether I should not in fact accept that
link alternate is a MUST.
Not really. There's no reason why the resource an Atom entry describes has to be visible online anywhere else.
An Atom Entry is a resource (identified by atom:id) whose representations
(atom:entry) describe the state of a web resource at a time
(the link alternate)
But in theory there's a one-to-one relationship between atom:id and the resource being described, and not between it and the link alternate (eg Alternate versions of several entries may all appear on the same webpage). This makes more sense to me:
An Atom Entry is a resource whose representations (atom:entry) describe the state
of a resource (identified by atom:id) at a time. [One or more alternate representations
of that resource may also be available (link alternate)]
The part in square brackets isn't really part of the definition of an entry. The "at a time" not having an associated element bugs me. It's too late now, but we really should have had a "When was this snapshot taken?" date element.
Graham
