James M Snell wrote: > Recent discussions around tombstones, the Atompub Features > draft, and other extensions have revealed an apparent need > for some level of formal review for I-D's intended for the > Standards Track. After discussing the subject with Lisa > Dusseault (the Area director), I believe that real progress > on these extensions can only be made within the context of a > formal IETF WG. Therefore, I am proposing the creation of an > "Atom Extensions" (atomext) WG that will be chartered to > review and publish Standards Track extensions and revisions > to the Atom format and publishing protocol. A draft charter > is provided below.
I think it makes more sense to get people to get some working implementations that have informally agreed on some extensions, and then bring those psuedo-standards to the IETF for standardization. Honestly, though, I'm not really sure what benefit that IETF provides over informal agreement between mailing list members. > The WG will initially focus on the review of existing > proposals for standards track extensions including: > > * Atom Bidi Extension, draft-snell-atompub-bidi-05 How much of a problem is BIDI in Atom today? (This isn't a rhetorical question). Atom documents are almost never hand-entered, and there is already a specification in place for markup up BIDI and even ruby text in general XML. The odds that clients and servers are going to correctly implement this extension--except those targeted direclty towards BIDI users--seem pretty low to me. Personally, it seems much easier to implement the an existing BIDI markup mechanism (Unicode, XML, and/or XHTML) than a new standard. Most Atom constructs that hold human-readable text allow for XHTML, which has its own BIDI mechanism. The main problem seems to be with person constructs, and with extension elements. The Atom BIDI draft doesn't solve the internationalization problems with person constructs because it doesn't provide a way to do Ruby text markup, which is especially important for atom:name. It also doesn't solve the problem with atom:link/@title or other attributes that are language-sensitive. We should have a guideline that says that every extension element that contains human-readable text should be an atom text construct--i.e. that is should support XHTML markup, and the BIDI and Ruby subsets of XHTML in particular. And, the specification for atom:name and other existing language-sensitive elements should be updated so that they meet this guideline. - Brian
