Re: Last Call: 'The Atom Syndication Format' to Proposed Standard

[Alexey Melnikov]

The IESG wrote:
The IESG has received a request from the Atom Publishing Format and Protocol 
WG to consider the following document:

- 'The Atom Syndication Format '
  <draft-ietf-atompub-format-08.txt> as a Proposed Standard
The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits
final comments on this action.  Please send any comments to the
iesg@ietf.org or ietf@ietf.org mailing lists by 2005-05-04.
The file can be obtained via
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-atompub-format-08.txt
 

In general the document looks good to me. Some minor comments (and few 
questions), mostly nitpicking below:

>3.1.1.1  Text
>
>   Example atom:title with text content:
>
>   ...
>   <title type="text">
>     Less: &lt;
>   </title>
>   ...
>
>   If the value is "text", the content of the Text construct MUST NOT
>   contain child elements.  Such text is intended to be presented to
>   humans in a readable fashion.  Thus, Atom Processors MAY collapse
>   white-space (including line-breaks),
Ok, maybe it is just me, but what does it mean to "collapse 
white-space"? Does this mean to replace FWS (in RFC 2822 sense) with a 
single space?

> and display the text using
>   typographic techniques such as justification and proportional fonts.
>4.1.3.3  Processing Model
...
>   2.  If the value of "type" is "html", the content of atom:content
>       MUST NOT contain child elements, and SHOULD be suitable for
>       handling as HTML [HTML].  The HTML markup must be escaped; for
Should the "must" be changed to MUST here?
>       example, "<br>" as "&lt;br>".  The HTML markup SHOULD be such
>       that it could validly appear directly within an HTML <DIV>
>       element.  Atom Processors that display the content MAY use the
>       markup to aid in displaying it.
...
>   6.  For all other values of "type", the content of atom:content MUST
>       be a valid Base64 encoding [RFC3548], which when decoded SHOULD
I have to note that the RFC 3548 has 2 base64 alphabets: in section 3 
and in section 4. You probably want the more common one in section 3, 
but this has to be stated explicitly.

>6.3  Software Processing of Foreign Markup
>
...
>   When unknown foreign markup is encountered in a Text Contruct or
>   atom:content element, software SHOULD ignore the markup and process
>   any text content of foreign elements as though the surrounding markup
>   were not present.
I reread this paragraph few times and I am still not quite sure what the 
paragraph is trying to say. Is it trying to say "if the content of a 
foreign element looks like XML with unrecognized schema - just strip the 
markup and process the text"?

Regards,
Alexey