>> It's crappy assumptions like this that made RSS hellish to work with. Atom is >> unambiguous. "application/xhtml+xml" means the page content is a full >>standalone web page. > > Not true. Atom *recommends* that the page content is a full standalone web > page. It's not a requirement.
Atom also says that you should expect it not to work. > Clearly Atom isn't as free of assumptions as you > might have hoped. It sure isn't any less hellish to work with. This has not been my experience. In Thunderbird, there's been one bug filed against the Atom 1.0 parser I wrote in two hours, and that bug was undeniably supported by the spec. I guess you can make it just as hard if you really try. The typed variants of the content element are an extension point. You could put application/xaml+xml in there, but I wouldn't expect many aggregators to support it. It is, however, accurately labeled. -- Robert Sayre "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."