On Mon, May 23, 2005 at 02:29:33PM +0200, A. Pagaltzis wrote: > * Robert Sayre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005-05-23 13:40]: > > What is the interop problem you are trying to avoid? You don't > > just throw in a SHOULD NOT and say "otherwise it would be > > hard". > > How else would you present a list of distinct authors for a set > of entries? What is the point of allowing multiple atom:author > elements, if not to require that each of them refer to only a > single person (or entity) so that the data can be extracted > precisely without resorting to fuzzy matching? I thought we???d > gone over this.
I think we're trying to do too much here. Why on earth are we disallowing a list of authors that includes the same person twice? Why does it actually cause problems? I can write the following English sentence: "The book was written by James Aylett, James Aylett, and James Aylett". I can do so meaning the /same/ James Aylett, using the repetition for effect. Banning this in Atom doesn't actually seem to have any good reason beyond a kind of technical tidying. Surely it's more useful to have the semantics "if you list the same person twice, you mean it" (leaving "mean it" to be a context of the feed; the feed description could explain it, for instance). So I'm -1 on this restriction, as I don't think it actually helps anyone. If you've got a way of displaying a list of people who wrote an article, then you've got a way that will work no matter which people you put in there. If the author of an entry or feed really wants the same person multiple times, who are we to stop them? James -- /--------------------------------------------------------------------------\ James Aylett xapian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] uncertaintydivision.org
