Tim Bray wrote:
I was driving to the airport with Lauren, whom some of you will know, she's technical but hasn't been following Atom. I explained the debate we are having over the required-ness of <atom:summary>, and she said "Don't you have anything better to talk about?" I suspect she has a point. Suppose we leave it the way it is... people who don't want to include a summary can use <summary/>, so it's just silly to say that there's an example of a current feed that would be ruled out. For that matter, Graham's body-only feeds can be done with <title/>. I can see Sam's arguments, but on the other hand, the errors that might get caught by requiring summary are probably boring corner-cases anyhow.
Which is to say, it doesn't matter very much.
Which is to say, Paul & I are gonna watch a little more debate and then we'll call rough consensus one way or the other, at which point I at least will become crushingly rude to anyone who wants to invest more time in this. -Tim
The feedvalidator catches silly, boring corner-cases every day.
I hesitate to bring it up again as it has proven to incite adhominen attacks from within this workgroup, but we have an example of a respected journalist who has published a book in which he specifically called out this.
And we have the experience from RSS 2.0 (motto: everything is optional! and extensible!) whereby Don Box introduced xhtml:body into his feed in place of description, something that most aggregators support today.
On the other hand, what we have is arguments that entries with empty summaries is not possible with the current format - something that is blatantly incorrect.
We also had a very complex and delicate negotiation a while back that seems to have been forgotten. It is quite possible to produce feeds with content that is base64 encoded binary or out of band. What is desired in such circumstances is precisely akin to specifications that require alt attributes for img tags. It atom's case, it is a summary.
If you want to push through this pace, I suggest that we revisit and reopen those discussions. Schedule be damned.
- Sam Ruby
