On 12/8/06, James M Snell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

I'm fine with the type parameter approach so long as it is effective.
By effective I mean: Will existing implementations actually take the
time to update their behavior to properly handle the optional type
parameter.


It would be useful to define better what is meant by "properly handle the
optional type parameter." Those that don't understand the parameter should
simply continue to operate on the current assumption that they can't really
be sure if they are reading a feed or an entry until they read the first few
bytes. Those that do understand the meaning of the optional parameter will
be writing code in the future and we can hope that if they become aware of
the type parameter and decide to care about it, they will have sufficient
awareness to do whatever they do in a "proper" manner.

The only case where I can see a problem would be those folk who match
against the existing media type as an opaque string and don't have any code
to handle opional type parameters. Such sloppy code would be broken by the
use of the optional type parameters since the presence of the parameter
would break the simple string matches used by these coders. However, I must
admit that I don't have much sympathy for such folk. Making basic design
decisions to adress the concerns of these sloppy folk is something like the
old prejudice against using XML attributes since it tended to make it harder
to create sloppy, regex based parsers... In any case, the alternative
proposal, create a new media type for entries, would tend to confuse people
who have their code written properly today --- those whose code understands
that the existing atom mediatype can be used for both a feed and and entry.
What we would be doing by creating a new media type is break the code of the
folk who paid attention to the spec in order to preserve the code of those
who didn't read the spec (or those who refused to see Atom as anything other
than some twisted form of RSS...) This doesn't make sense to me. We should
use the type parameter if anything is changed here.

bob wyman

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