On 8/22/05, Justin Fletcher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Mon, 22 Aug 2005, Tim Bray wrote: > > > On Aug 22, 2005, at 7:26 AM, Joe Gregorio wrote: > > > >>> Essentially, LiveJournal is making this data available to anybody who > >>> wishes to access it, without any need to register or to invent a unique > >>> API. > >> > >> Ahh, I had thought this was a more dedicated ping traffic stream. The > >> never ending Atom document makes much more sense now. > > > > It's got another advantage. You connect and ask for the feed. You get > > > > <feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom";> > > ....... goes on forever ........ > > > > and none of the entry documents need to redeclare the Atom namespace, which > > saves quite a few bytes after the first hundred thousand or so entries. -Tim > > I'm a little confused by all this discussion of never-ending XML > documents, mainly because my understanding is that without the > well-formedness checks the content might as well be free form, and the > elements within the document may rely on parts that have 'yet to arrive'.
Not at all: """The "atom:feed" element is the document (i.e., top-level) element of an Atom Feed Document, acting as a container for metadata and data associated with the feed. Its element children consist of metadata elements *followed by* zero or more atom:entry child elements.""" http://atompub.org/2005/07/11/draft-ietf-atompub-format-10.html#rfc.section.4.1.1 -joe -- Joe Gregorio http://bitworking.org
