I'm not sure the -06 draft tells a consistent story about
extensibility.

| 6.2  Extensions To the Atom Vocabulary
| 
|    Future versions of this specification may add new elements and
|    attributes to the Atom markup vocabulary.  Software written to
|    conform to this version of the specification will not be able to
|    process such markup correctly and, in fact, will not be able to
|    distinguish it from markup error.  For the purposes of this
|    discussion, unrecognized markup from the Atom vocabulary will be
|    considered "foreign "markup".
| 
|    Unlike markup from other vocabularies, foreign markup from the Atom
|    vocabulary MAY appear at any location in an Atom document.

That last paragraph suggests that foreign markup *not* from the Atom
vocabulary may not appear at any location, that it must only appear in
specified places.

But

| 6.4  Extension Elements
| 
|    Atom allows foreign markup anywhere in an Atom document.

Then we're told foreign markup is allowed anywhere. Do we really mean
that?

The text in 4.1.2 seems related to me:

| 4.1.2  The "atom:entry" Element
| 
|    The "atom:entry" element represents an individual entry, acting as a
|    container for metadata and data associated with the entry.  This
|    element can appear as a child of the atom:feed element, or it can
|    appear as the document (i.e., top-level) element of a standalone Atom
|    Entry Document.
| 
|    The atom:entry element MAY contain any namespace-qualified
|    [W3C.REC-xml-names-19990114] elements as children.  This
|    specification assigns no significance to the order of appearance of
|    the child elements of atom:entry.

Saying that atom:entry may contain namespace-qualified elements as children
really looks out of place. If we say it here, why don't we say it for
atom:feed and other places? I think that sentence should be deleted.

Assuming that we *don't* mean for extension elements to appear *anywhere*,
then were do we want them?

I think we want them:

1. In atom:feed metadata
2. In atom:entry metadata
3. In PersonConstructs

Should they also be allowed *between* atom:entry elements in a feed?

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | Everything should be made as simple as
http://nwalsh.com/            | possible, but no simpler.

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