Well, the second half of my work week ended up getting preempted by a
stupid primary development workstation that decided to go kaput on me so
I have not yet had the opportunity to write up the Profile media type
extension spec. While I'm waiting for the last few apps to download so I
can reinstall them, I figured it would at least be helpful for me to
write up my thoughts and I'll get the draft published next week.
Basically, a "Profile" is going to be some kind of document that
provides implementation guidelines for an Atom app. It will define a
specific use of Atom along with whatever extensions, assumptions,
options, etc necessary for that. For instance, one could easily imagine
a "Blogging" profile for Atom that describes in detail how to use the
Atom publishing protocol specifically for Weblogs, etc.
Every Profile document will be associated with an identifier. The
identifier is either a short name or an IRI following the same pattern
as atom:link/@rel values. However, use of the short names will be
restricted and must follow a strict convention... Specifically, only
Profiles published through the IETF process will be allowed short
names. For a Profile published as an Internet-Draft, the profile
identifier is the document name. For instance, given a theoretical
draft-snell-profile-blogging-01.txt, the identifier for the Profile is
"draft-snell-profile-blogging-01". For a Profile published as an RFC,
the project identifier is the RFC# in the pattern "RFC####". The
shortnames are always case-insensitive so "rfc9999" is equivalent to
"RFC9999" or "Rfc9999", etc. For all other Profiles, the identifier is
an absolute IRI that SHOULD be dereference-able to retrieve the Profile
document.
In all Atom media types, the profile parameter is an optional quoted,
whitespace delimited list of profile identifiers, e.g.
application/atom+xml;
profile="RFC9999
draft-snell-profile-blogging-01
http://example.org/profile/foo";
Someone looking at this media type can determine that the Atom document
in question conforms to three profiles identified by "RFC999",
"draft-snell-profile-blogging-01", and "http://example.org/profile/foo";.
What "Conformance" means depends entirely on the profile.
The profile parameter is intended only as a hint. An application can use
it to help make decisions about a linked resource, etc but the presence
of a particular profile identifier in the media type does not place any
obligations on the application.
As always, comments are requested and welcomed.
- James
