On May 23, 2006, at 12:16 PM, Tim Bray wrote:
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 find this to be a pretty compelling argument. Unless RFC4287 were
rewritten (with a time machine, perhaps) to forbid extensions in
attributes, extension writers will occasionally put data in
attributes, and the libraries will have to deal with this, regardless
of how the Thread proposal works.
Lisa
