Erik Wilde wrote:
thanks for pointing that out. i was (almost) proposing to leave
atom:source unchanged, with the exception of the foreign markup of the
via:via attribute.
Sorry, I misunderstood you. I thought you had intended to add multiple
source elements to each entry. The foreign markup doesn't bother me that
much.
or would the via:via element no simply be a repetition of <link> and it
should be like this:
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"; xml:via="...">
<link xml:id="id1" rel="via" href="http://example.com/feed-C"; />
<link xml:id="id2" rel="via" href="http://example.com/feed-D"; />
...
<entry>
<link rel="via" href="http://example.com/feed-C"/>
<source>
<link rel="self" href="http://example.com/feed-A"; />
The spec is a bit vague in its description, but the intended purpose of the
via link, as I understood it, was so that the entry author could credit the
source of their "story". For example, if you read about a new iPhone release
on Engadget and decided to blog about it, your blog entry could include a
via link back to Engadget.
Since you're not the author of these entries, you have no right to makes
claims about the source of the story. In general you need to be very careful
about making *any* changes to an entry when you're republishing someone
else's content verbatim in an aggregated feed.
As for the use of xml:id, I think that's unwise considering you can't
guarantee uniqueness across the whole feed (which could make the document
invalid). You have no way of knowing what other extensions might be using
xml:id attributes which could conflict with yours (they would also be unwise
to do so, but if you're considering it, you have to assume that someone else
is too).
It wouldn't be so bad if you were using something more universally unique in
your ids, like a URI of some sort. But in that case, you might just as well
reference the link href and avoid the xml:id altogether.
Regards
James
