Removing Andrew seeming his email bounces…
On 26 Mar 2009, at 05:48, John Panzer wrote:
Note: Blogger exports and imports blogs in an extended Atom format; we'd be interested in standardizing (the main extension is keeping comments with entries, and efforts have been made to re-use existing standards). Let me know if you want details.
Right, I had a look at what you guys did. My main issue was making certain values of atom:category significant, which seems a rather dirty hack (for a start, if you try and interpret it as a normal Atom feed document, you get something you don't want). Furthermore, it means that if an object has to be created for a Post/Comment, it couldn't be done (nor processing really beginning) until the atom:entry end tag had been seen, which makes processing a lot more complex using a streaming parser (which, as export files can easily become large, is needed).
The two nicer solutions I can think of are to either place atom:entry within a child element of atom:feed if it is a comment (but this falls into integration issue with things like atom:entry's atom:author coming from atom:feed or not, etc.), or to add an attribute to atom:entry (but this again has issues when the processor isn't aware of the export format, but has the possibility of being backwards compatible with Blogger).
Needless to say, all of these solutions have downsides, which is why I went with the ustar-based solution (which has it's downsides too, such as greater implementation complexity, but it has the advantage of being able to store other files apart from what can be easily put within the Atom feed).
-- Geoffrey Sneddon <http://gsnedders.com/>
