Richard Salz wrote:
Happy New Year.
I want to add content to an atom:entry, but it's intended for use by
computers not humans. I know atom:content can hold arbitrary XML, but I'm
not sure if I should use that or if I should put it as a direct child of
the atom:entry element.
I don't like usurping the "human-readable" intent of atom:content. Also,
since it's Language-Sensitive, I have a slight concern about someone
translating machine field names and the like. There's a (slight) chance
that the content could from different components, which is why I prefer
inserting elements into atom:entry instead of "rewriting" atom:content. I
don't have any justficiation for that other than "gut feel" however.
I want to be able to associate a schema with the data (see
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/soma), and using atom:entry
seems cleaner. But it's a small matter to say the schema link relation is
scoped to the atom:entry atomInlineOtherContent type.
In practice, you don't want to put anything other than HTML in
atom:content if you intend this feed to be consumed by general Atom
processors and aggregators. Many aggregators (and feed re-publishers)
will misbehave with anything other than <content type="html"> and
escaped content.
You can add arbitrary XML elements as children of atom:entry, and use
xml:lang to define what human language is within.
Of course, if you intend this feed to only ever be consumed by your own
software it doesn't really matter what you do as long as your producer
and your consumer agree.
If you are able to give more details about specifically what you are
trying to do folks might be able to suggest a way to do it that does not
involve extending Atom at all, at least at the XML level.
