Tim Bray wrote:
On Nov 11, 2004, at 8:35 PM, Robert Sayre wrote:Once again, why? It's so easy to explain and understand: if there's an <author> in the <head>, then that applies to all the <entry>s which don't have their own <author>. Simple, logical, uncomplicated, efficient.
Put another way, if you have a a feed of ten entries, with one entry attributed to someone else, your feed-level authorship still applies to all ten entries.
I wonder if it's simple. The fact that it has to be explained repeatedly to one of the editors indicates a problem *. I'm not sure it's simple for multi-author scenarios or composite feeds. It'll work for my blog, but I don't know if it's work for pubsub.
Specifically: if the inheritence rules we've outlined can result in false positives (ie an incorrect authoring attribution), it needs to rectified/clarified. Danny's written out the implications, perhaps he can tell us one way or another.
Fwiw, damaging data like this is bad form and standardizing it is unlikely to get my consensus - I don't much care if it's legacy or de facto in current formats (as Martin has pointed out). Even if it's not harmful, there's absolutely a need to firm up the text.
cheers Bill
* One of my pet observations from my relatively short time in this industry is that the consequences of implicit of such inheritence and scoping mechanisms consistently trips people up - I've never seen simple inheritence.
