Re: solving the extensibility problem

[Antone Roundy]

On Tuesday, November 9, 2004, at 08:03  AM, Henry Story wrote:
	A. tweak the current Atom standard just enough so that it is not RDF 
but would
without any problems be RDF if the rdf:parseType, rdf:datatype, ... 
attributes get added. With a formal model backing it (where the 
predicates would be defined using the correct namespace, placed at the 
correct http location), this would allow people who want to extend 
Atom to add those missing attributes, and thereby turn Atom into RDF, 
giving them all the extensibility they desire. Simple xml parsers will 
have to be told to ignore any attributes or constructs that are not in 
the spec. The people extending Atom in this way will only be able to 
say it is atom, if an Atom parser that ignores all the RDF magic can 
parse the feed correctly.

Based on your example, I don't think I'd have a problem with this, but 
I'd have to see more details fleshed out.  For those who don't want to 
go whole-hog, the differences in your example would be:

* change "feed" to "Feed"
* add xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"; in <feed>
* change @href to @rdf:resource in <link>
None of those changes looks painful to me.  The questions I have are:
1) whether more drastic changes would be needed to other elements or 
attributes that aren't found in the example.

2) how this might affect extensions--what constraints would need to be 
placed on extensions to ensure that they can play nicely in both RDF 
and non-RDF Atom feeds?

Antone