As Julian pointed out, you'll need an IETF WG to update or obsolete
the Atom syntax specification to make this legitimate. The bar is much
lower for a "traditional" extension.
None of this is your fault; the extension model in Atom isn't terribly
well-specified.
Regardless of how you serialise the hierarchy, at some point the
document you're going to end up with will not be very useful to a
generic Atom processor (as deployed today), because the majority of
the information is in extensions. When that happens, it's worth
considering minting a new media type to identify the document, so that
people can differentiate them.
This also gives an opportunity to put in fixes that would otherwise be
backwards-incompatible, and in general tighten things up. IMO, there
are a number of things that needs to be cleaned up in Atom, especially
for the non-blog use case.
Just food for thought,
On 04/06/2009, at 2:43 AM, Nikunj R. Mehta wrote:
On Jun 2, 2009, at 6:28 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
On 27/05/2009, at 10:12 PM, Julian Reschke wrote:
I do not agree with that conclusion, but nevertheless, just
because something is syntactically legal doesn't make it a good
choice.
+1 - the clearest way to communicate what's going on here is to use
a new child element.
Assuming that the contents of the link element are inlined content
are adding an extension without explicitly identifying it; this may
conflict with future uses. There isn't a way for an Atom processor
to inspect a link element and know that the content is inlined;
they have to guess that this specification is in effect, therefore
the link content is the inlined content. This isn't good practice.
Just FYI, Joe Gregorio and by implication Google supports directly
embedding atom:content inside atom:link. See the last comment on
[1]. I don't know what we mean by practice here, but that is exactly
what is going on in lots of places.
Nikunj
http://o-micron.blogspot.com
[1]
http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/archive/2008/02/18/related-entries-and-feeds-links-and-link-expansion.aspx#8573352
--
Mark Nottingham http://www.mnot.net/
