[[ Now wearing my advocacy hat ]]
At 11:40 AM -0800 11/4/04, Walter Underwood wrote:
--On Thursday, November 04, 2004 10:40:04 AM -0800 "Paul Hoffman / IMC" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
1) Most people seem to like the idea of an Atom error reporting facility, although some don't because they think it will never get used.
I object for a different reason.
It seems to me that it is trying to enable a social pressure on feeds that don't meet the standard. I think this is new ground for a protocol standard. Usually, implementation validation is a separate phase, and not part of normal operation.
I know we are all really tired of busted HTML and XML, but this doesn't seem like it solves the problem. Getting rid of bad feeds requires publicising them, not telling the publisher (who might not care).
I see a conflict between your first sentence ("It seems to...") and your last ("Getting rid of...").
It is important to be able to figure out the feed software and version, so we can say the AtomBrainCreature 13.1 is busted and get the word out. But that requires notifying the implementor, not the publisher.
Overall comments:
I don't see reporting errors to the senders as enabling social pressure. To me, it is alerting senders that they software that they are using, which they probably didn't write (unless they are a subscription service), is emitting bad data. That gives the user a few options, such as alert the vendor, change software, and so on.
It *is* new ground, and I think it's good new ground. It lets Atom emitters know whether or not they are being good Atom citizens. It (hopefully) cleans things up early so that reader vendors have fewer features that they need to be bug-compatible with. Those are very positive, I think.
If the Atom emitter doesn't care, it is trivial for them not to listen, and trivial for them not even to tell receivers how to tell them something they aren't going to listen to. If they do care, even mildly, having a standard way of hearing about the errors is good. It will certainly make tech support for the developers of emitter software easier.
--Paul Hoffman, Director --Internet Mail Consortium
