This gets back to the brief discussion I had with Henry Story about the
attributes of the link vs the attributes of what the link points to. A single
resource (theoretically) exists but there may be various representations of it.
How do we specifiy this with the current link model?
My initial thoughts with respect to enclosures is a
single resource (e.g. an image) but it may have various representations
(e.g. resolutions, etc.). We could have a single "alternate"
link (link attribute) but several URLs, each with its own attributes (minimal,
authoritative, etc.).
But I don't want to reopen this issue...
Brett Lindsley, Motorola Labs
Antone Roundy wrote:
On Wednesday, April 27, 2005, at 08:53 AM, Eric Scheid wrote:
why not
<feed>
<link rel="alternate" type="application/xml+atom title="minimal"/>
<link rel="alternate" type="application/xml+atom title="authoritative"/>
<link rel="alternate" type="application/xml+atom title="summmaries"/>
...
</feed>
and the client agent can then present these to the user to select from.
At present:
atom:feed elements MUST NOT contain more than one atom:link element with a rel attribute value of "alternate" that has the same type attribute value.
...but if that were something other than "alternate"...
The question is, do you want this to be automatically discoverable or only user selectable? Finding the authoritative variant automatically might be important for some applications. Finding a variant with a specific set of elements and as few others as possible might be important for other applications. That COULD be done by downloading and inspecting each variant.
...but I'm really speculating here. The main reason I brought this up now was because, given that some people are already publishing variant feeds, it might be good to answer the question of whether using the same atom:id in variants of an entry is legal, and if so, how such things should/could be handled.
