Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:
> * Herbert van de Sompel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-09-12 01:00]:
> > The ORE effort [1] that proposes a profile of Atom to meet its
> > requirements [2], has a need to express that an Atom Entry provides
> > information/metadata about some other resource.
>
> Thats `rel="alternate"` it states that the metadata in the
> Entry applies to the linked resource.
Perhaps in theory, but not in practice. The metadata for an entry always
describes the entry that contains it. The resource being linked by
rel=alternate is supposed to encode the same information that the Atom entry
does, just in a different format or a different language. If that is the
case, then the metadata that describes the entry should also describe the
alternate representations because all the representations should encode the
same information. However, in reality, the alternate representation often
encodes similar *but slightly different* information than what is encoded in
the Atom entry. For example, a weblog entry might have the title "More
Kitten Pictures" but the alternate HTML representation might have the title
"~~~LOL~~~ More Kitten Pictures - Billy's Cute Kitty Cat Picture Photostream
by Billy Bob Barker ~~~LOL~~~".
> You cant use Atom elements in a single Entry to provide
> metadata about different resources anyway. To achieve that
> you would need extension elements, not a new link relation,
> otherwise documents you claim are Atom will actually be
> something very similar to Atom but not Atom, since 100% RFC
> 4287-compliant implementations will process such documents in
> an unintended manner.
Exactly. If you want an atom entry to contain metadata for a resource other
than the entry itself, you need to put that other resource's metadata in
atom:content and not directly in the atom:entry. For example, if you have
RDF metadata that describes some other resource, then you can easily do that
with:
<content type='application/rdf+xml'>
<!--metadata for the other resource-->
</content>.
Remember that the metadata nested directly in the atom:entry element always
describes the entry itself. The rel='about' proposal would require
applications that understand rel='about' to process the entry's metadata
differently from all existing (and future) applications that don't
understand rel='about'. That would just be a mess.
- Brian
