David Powell wrote:
<link rel="alternate"
type="application/atom+xml"
hreflang="fr"
x:id="french_entry_id" />
What do you think?
I assume that there is an href missing from that?
Actually no. At least not necessarily. That was to indicate the special case
where the link was pointing to an entry in the same feed.
Isn't it likely that the entry will have been dropped from the end of
the feed by the time anyone dereferences it? Would it be better to
point the link at a static Atom Entry document instead.
I would say that's up to the publisher to decide since it depends on how
they expect the information to be used. There's nothing wrong with them
linking to an Atom entry document (and that was one of my suggested
solutions earlier), but creating a separate document for every entry may not
be something they're willing to do.
If a client is already subscribed to the feed containing the translation and
they save all data in the feed then the problem goes away. Alternatively the
publisher could use the Feed History extension (when it eventually becomes
available) which would enable a client to search through the archives to
find the translation if necessary.
to explain why some options might be better than others. It is
difficult to support attribute extensions in an APP server or Atom API
without explicitly coding support for each one. It is quite likely
that some implementations will fail to preserve the namespaced
attribute and forward on a corrupted link element without it.
That had occurred to me and I had another somewhat obscure idea in that
regard. How wrong would it be to use the anchor part of the URI to refer to
an entry in a feed the same way you can point to a particular element on an
html page? That way you wouldn't need an extension attribute for the id
anymore. Obviously some characters in the id would need to be escaped since
it's a URI itself, but other than that I don't see any technical problems
with the concept.
Regards
James
