On 12/5/06, James M Snell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Mark Baker wrote:
It's just an entry without a feed. You'd use the same code
path to process that entry whether it were found in an entry
or feed document, right?
Not necessarily... The majority of applications that most
frequently handle Atom Feed Documents have no idea how
to deal with Atom Entry Documents and I would wager that
most applications that understand how to process Atom Entry
Documents and Atom Feed Documents typically don't fall into
the same category as most feed readers.
What you seem to be implying is that the majority of applications that
process Atom Feed documents are not, in fact, supporting extremely important
parts of the atom specification. I believe that any properly constructed
Atom Feed parser will contain all the code needed to parse the most complex
Atom Entry document. And, an entry document with an atom:source is
semantically equivelant to an atom:feed with a single entry... The problem
here is that people insist on building Atom parsers that aren't capable of
handling more semantics than legacy RSS. What we should be doing is
encouraging people to exploit Atom and use its features -- atom:source among
others -- that aren't supported by RSS.
For a parser that properly handles the case of an atom:entry appearing
within atom:feed, it should be trivially simple code to recognize and
handle an entry without a feed wrapper. I think there are even cases where
this makes sense -- and you would even want to subscribe to such a thing:
Consider a "feed" that communicates "current weather" or "current stock
price", etc. We wouldn't be surprised if such a "feed" never contained more
than a single entry. We also wouldn't be surprised if the publisher of this
single entry feed decided that he wanted to sign the entry in this
single-entry-feed and was thus forced to insert all of the feed data into
the entry's atom:source. Of course, once you've got a single-entry Atom feed
which contains a signed entry, you have all the feed data duplicated -- so,
it wouldn't be surprising to see authors of such feeds argue that they
shouldn't be forced to waste bits on duplicated feed data when an atom entry
document provides exactly what they need.
In any case, while it appears reasonable (and sometimes efficient) for
people to subscribe to Entry documents, I don't think we should do anything
disruptive unless someone can establish actual harm being caused by the
current state of affairs.
bob wyman
