* James Holderness <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005-10-27 16:40]: > I don't see how an Atom processor can do anything useful with > it (which couldn't be done just as easily with existing > elements). And if it's not of any use, it seems to be that it's > just taking up space and complicating the spec.
+1, which won’t surprise anyone. I managed to miss the fact that this extension cannot be used in non-Atom documents, otherwise I’d have argued along these lines before, though I doubt I would have managed anything nearly as coherent. One might argue that removing the Atom-specifity would be another way out of the current dilemma, but measured against the points you make it would feel to me like a mistake. We started with a simple hack – arguably too simple – that somehow grew into trying to be everything to everyone. In the process it lost of a lot of semantic “hardness.” This is the main reason I was never very happy with the dereferencable links; I still can’t explain what I mean as abstractly as I think about it, but your explanation for why they’re not useful is concrete demonstration. In any case, I would be elated to see this extension shed a lot of weight and go back to addressing a clearly bounded purpose. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
