Tim Bray wrote:
On Jan 13, 2005, at 2:29 PM, David Powell wrote:
Does anyone have any example use cases for mustUnderstand?
1. A stream of financial disclosures from a public company in a highly-regulated industry. The legislation is very clear that they may not say anything in public unaccompanied by disclaimers and limitation-of-liability statements. The financial industry gets together an introduces an extension that requests clients to display these disclaimers in a fashion that meets the regulatory requirements. If Atom has MustUnderstand, compliant clients that can't do this will never fail to display the appropriate material, and this reduces the risk of litigation and makes it more likely that such feeds will be created.
So they write a spec that "requires display", and now any client that doesn't "display" stuff can't use it? This proposal seems uniquely prone to abuse by "morons" and "assholes."[0]
Why does the proposal equate "vocabularies" with XML Namespaces? I don't think the namespace spec does that(??). Is it possible to "understand a namespace"?
Also, this proposal does seem to have real implementation costs for programs that don't use streaming parsers directly. For example, SafariRSS parses feeds with an XQuery script. They also store entries forever, but maybe they don't version feed properties. What happens to their implementation if a feed intermittently contains these mU declarations? I'm confused by it.
Robert Sayre
[0] http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/08/16/specs http://www.google.com/search?q=morons+and+assholes
