On May 18, 2006, at 6:15 AM, David Powell wrote:
What I see as a problem is that reasonable implementations will not preserve Atom documents bit-for-bit, so they will need to explicitly support this draft if they don't want to corrupt data by dropping the thr:count attributes. By the letter of RFC4287 there is no problem with the draft, but practically there is something like a layering concern if an extension requires existing conformant implementations to be changed.
At the end of the day, the marketplace will work within the constraints of what 4287 allows; my feeling is that there are going to be a ton of extensions that will attach unforeseen metadata at arbitrary points with Atom documents, and implementations that fail to store these and make them retrievable will quickly be seen as broken. -Tim
I notice that you said "implemented support" - that is fine for user-agents etc, but I don't believe that Atom infrastructure should be required to "implement support" for each new bit of content that publishers put into their feeds.
On the contrary; I think that implementors who fail to deal with the fact that people will be adding their own non-Atom stuff at every conceivable place in an Atom feed are being very stupid, because this will happen whatever we say. -Tim
