Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:
As a publisher, yes. For authors of clients, particularly clients
intended for a specific purpose, the extent to which other
existing clients fail to take advantage of the specified features
of the format is of little relevance.
But it *is* relevant - that was my point. It's not much good a feed
publisher using some esoteric feature of Atom to make an image feed more
accessible to blind users, if at the same time it makes those images
invisible to the vast majority of sighted users!
I don't meant to imply that there aren't any features of Atom that would be
useful for accessibility. I just think publishers need to be careful how
they approach this sort of problem. When reading that the Atom *format* is
capable of doing X, Y and Z, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that Atom
*clients* will also automatically support X, Y and Z. That's often not the
case.
That doesn't apply to all forms of content of course
Which is the point. In the cases where it doesn’t apply, RSS
offers no way to do it at all. Atom does.
I'm not convinced of that. For example, that DOAP feed you posted a while
could just as easily be implemented in RSS by embedding a doap:Project block
as a child of the item element with a description element for the summary.
The advantage of Atom is that it makes content like that somewhat easier to
surface via a feed processing API, but ultimately you're still probably
going to be writing a custom processor to handle the data. There's not much
that you just get for free.
No, but I would not be surprised if some web-based aggregator or
other passes titles through with markup intact, or could easily
do so by adding the ruby markup elements to a whitelist.
I would be surprised, which is why I was asking. I'm almost sure most of the
major online aggregators (google reader, bloglines, newsgator) strip markup.
Also, as long as major clients do not misinterpret the markup in
harmful ways and I had some content to publish that was already
annotated, I would include the markup anyway
I definitely agree with you there. Although feed readers have not had a very
good track record when it comes to dealing with markup in the past, I
suspect you're pretty safe with most major clients these days.
Of course there's always the option of using Unicode interlinear annotation
characters when markup is not an option. However, I suspect that's even less
likely to be supported than ruby markup, and at least the markup has a
decent fallback.
Regards
James
