--On Friday, November 12, 2004 12:55:55 AM -0500 Bob Wyman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
It would make much more sense, I think, to acknowledge that we're stuck with "inheritance" in at least the ownership fields (author and copyright) and provide a mechanism to allow people to override the inheritance when it is inappropriate. This is already assumed to be provided by having entry-level author/copyright statements trump the feed-level statements. Perhaps we should complete this system by ensuring that it is legal to provide null authors and/or copyrights to cover the case where the feed-level data is known to not apply to the entry yet the "correct" values are not known. Ie. We could support <author></author>. (The meaning would be null or "not known" rather than "none".) Or, how does one express "null" in XML?
I like this, though I'd prefer something really clear, like
<author notspecified="true"/>. I'd prefer a different term than "inheritance", because that brings up classes and type systems for a lot of people. How about "defaulting", "elision", "use value from the feed", or "cascading values". Hmm, kinda like that last one.
wunder -- Walter Underwood Principal Architect Verity Ultraseek
