Sylvain Hellegouarch wrote:
Atom may have come from the blogging world but it's pretty clear that it gradually becomes the de facto envelop format for any kind of exchange.
The question is why? I don't see much benefit in using Atom over some proprietary form of XML (but plenty of disadvantages) unless you specifically intend the data to be readable in a typical, blog-reading, Atom client as well.
I suspect there's a lot of cargo-cult engineering behind many uses of Atom outside the blogging world. Just because you can wrap your data in an Atom envelope, that doesn't mean you should.
However if we decide to extend the atom vocabulary like Yahoo did with Media-RSS, we ought to actually discuss first with the main players in the field today (Apple, Microsoft, Xiph, EXIF, etc.) in order to define the minimal relevant set of metadata for common media formats.
We're back to the use-case of "have metadata - must publish". Why? Who wants that metadata? What for?
Regards James
