At 07:35 05/01/26, Robert Sayre wrote: > >Walter Underwood wrote:
>> 6. Client processing requirements
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>> Atom feeds served over HTTP MUST be well-formed XML 1.0, as defined in Section 2.1 of the XML specification <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-well-formed>. Furthermore, the concept of XML well-formedness relies on first determining the character encoding of the XML document. RFC 3023 defines how to determine the character encoding of XML documents served over HTTP.
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>The first sentence is redundant because all Atom feeds must be well-formed. The second sentence is plainly false. The two concepts are unrelated.
Could you explain/substantiate your claim that the second sentence is plainly false? I understand it to be true, and I have implementation experience with the W3C Markup Validator to back it up.
>> 5.
>> Publishers MUST NOT serve Atom feeds with a media type other than "application/atom+xml" (registered in this Section 8 of document) or one of the XML media types defined in RFC 3023 or its successor. In particular, "text/plain" is never an appropriate media type for an Atom feed. When retrieving an Atom feed served with a non-XML media type, clients MUST reject it as non-well-formed.
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>We have no business stating this. I will serve Atom feeds as text/plain if I want them processed as text documents.
At which time I will claim that it's no longer an Atom feed, it just looks like one :-). The Atom spec should talk about Atom as Atom; that somebody might want to look at the Atom document as a text document, or even as a hex dump, isn't something we should be talking about.
Regards, Martin.
