Hi John,

* John R. Frank <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-09-16 21:25]:
> Please forgive me if this is documented somewhere

it’s not.

> We're working with several news paper web sites who want to
> provide both an "official" URL and also a means of accessing a
> "printer-friendly" or "de-chromed" version of the content
> associated with that URL.

What is your goal with this feature?

From a purely theoretical perspective, the printer-friendly
version is just another alternate representation of the same
resource, for which Atom already provides a link relation –
makes it the default one, even. (And an Entry can have any number
of alternate links.) If you give it a title like “Print Version”,
a human would know which one to pick.

But if your aim is to allow readers to print stories, your very
best bet by a long shot is to include a small “Printable version”
link inside the summary or full-text of an entry. Another option
that you may take either in addition or by itself is to include
the link to the printer-friendly version with `rel="related"`.
Many aggregators do not display these links, but quite a few
will. It is highly doubtful whether any of them will be able to
do something useful when faced with an Entry that has multiple
alternate links. It is, OTOH, not doubtful at all that absolutely
none of them will display a `rel="printer-friendly"` link.

However, if enabling automatic processing (such as letting people
write scripts to pull the feed and print all of the entries as a
kind of personal newspaper, or whatever) is a consideration,
then providing such a `rel="printer-friendly"` link is pretty
much imperative. It won’t help human readers with aggregators at
all, though, as I already mentioned.

Note that these options are not exclusive. You could include two
or three links to the same URI but with different `rel` values,
in order to address different kinds of feed processors.

As for atom:content, what do you *currently* have in there? In
general, content published in feeds should avoid any sort of
chrome anyway – since the content gets rendered in a big variety
of display contexts, it will be more widely useful the more
purely semantical and non-presentational it is. So depending on
circumstances the answer to your question may really be to simply
stick the printer-friendly content in atom:content and not worry
about including special link.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>

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