On 21 May 2005, at 1:59 am, Tim Bray wrote:
Let me speak as a victim of a few years in the publishing-software trenches: The semantics of author and contributor are a tangled mess, a real swamp, and I don't think that Atom is going to do a very good job of solving them. In particular, I don't think we're going to a better job than Dublin Core.
Why are we using "author" instead of "creator" then? The current setup is a rushed kludge that came about before we started thinking things through, not a conscious decision to echo Dublin Core.
That is to say, if we were to do as some suggest (nuke atom:contributor and make atom:author repeatable) I'm quite certain that we could come up with all sorts of corner cases and problems, probably about as many as with the current setup.
You can say that about anything. A flat list of people associated with an entry is infinitely better than the weird one author/multiple contributors model that doesn't offer a clear way to cope with the common model of multiple co-authors.
Graham
