Well, of course PDF, Office, Wordperfect don't have the notion of mandatory extensions. They want sole control over their formats AND the processing software. They want to be the gatekeepers for any future incompatible changes or versions.
I don't think you are really suggesting that Atom should be run the same way that PDF is run from a distributed extensibility and versioning perspective. Atom can enable fully functional distributed extensibility and versioning for it's community, as opposed to being the centralized authority for mandatory extensions. Dave > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-atom- > [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Walter Underwood > Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2004 11:42 AM > To: Atom WG > Subject: Re: Published extensibility Paces > > > About "must understand": > > --On Thursday, November 11, 2004 11:01 AM -0800 Tim Bray > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Questions for Joe: > > 1. Why do you think this is hard to implement? > > 2. Assuming I can persuade you that it's cheap, would you be OK with it > > even given the lack of use in SOAP? > > Speaking as "Joe for a day": We parse no formats with compulsory > extensions. It just doesn't exist for PDF, MS Office, OpenOffice, > WordPerfect, whatever. You want to change it, you rev the version. > > Implementing this require a new result from parsing: it is a legal > document, but we are not allowed to tell you what is in it. > > Feeds are in a funny place between API and document. But I think > they are more document than API. APIs have "must understand", but > documents don't. > > What does a search engine do when faced with a "must understand" > element? Throw away the whole thing and log it? Ignore the spec > and salvage what we can? Which one results in fewer support calls? > > wunder > -- > Walter Underwood > Principal Architect, Verity
