Peter Keane wrote: > James Snell wrote: > > I disagree. Feeds already contain several sets of things... > > entries, authors, contributors, links, and categories. Adding a > > new set of things is not a "huge" change by any stretch of > > the imagination. > > But those are all clearly "metadata about the feed" i.e. they > have a well-defined relationship with the feed. Same with > entries -- the conceptual model (although not spelled out in > the spec) is easy to grok. > Being able to abstract out a conceptual model is *really* > important and it's what makes Atom so useful. What sort of > things are these tombstones? > Well, their most obvious relationship is to an entry not the > feed itself.
What practical implications does this have? This is just a distinction without a difference. The specification says: Child elements of atom:entry, atom:feed, atom:source, and Person constructs are considered Metadata elements and are described below. Child elements of Person constructs are considered to apply to the construct. The role of other foreign markup is undefined by this specification. There is no "about the feed" there. > How would I extend one of these tombstones in a similar but > not-exactly-the-original-purpose way? Atom is an elegant set of > *interfaces* and here are these *implementation details* > (tombstones) smack dab in the middle. > > Also, what sort of slippery slope is this? Will this be the > start of more bags of stuff being added to a feed? Sure, why not? - Brian
