Sam Ruby wrote:
Graham wrote:
On 6 May 2005, at 3:50 am, Sam Ruby wrote:
FYI: we have an instance proof of this requiring an existing tool to do additional work:
http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg13983.html
Tools will have to be updated to work with Atom? Scandalous.
+1 to the Pace
This Pace is not one that I plan to lie down in the road over. However, it continues to puzzle the bejeebers out of me.
The channel link element is required in every version of RSS from 0.91 to 1.0 to 2.0. And as a co-author of the feedvalidator, I have seen a lot of broken feeds where people have either inadvertently or deliberately ignored the specification, but I don't recall ever seeing one where this element was not present.
Which shows that those who don't have a useful link to report just make something up. If Atom requires the link, the situation will likely be the same. I just don't get how this is better than just stating "there's no alternative representation" instead.
Out of the three feeds I currently generate/author, only one has meaningful "alternate" version.
My concern is not that tools will need to be updated. My concern is that tools won't know that they need to update. How will they know that they need to update to handle a set of feeds that nobody is currently providing?
Which tools are you talking about? Tools that consume RSS variants, or tools that consume earlier Atom format versions? The latter will have to be upgraded anyway because of the changing XML namespace.
Something that WOULD attract my attention is somebody saying "here is a set of feeds that I would like to provide that I can't provide in a valid way according to any of the available RSS specifications."
As stated earlier, this is the case here. I had to make up the "alternate" link value just to satisfy the validator (<http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgreenbytes.de%2Ftech%2Fwebdav%2Fwebdav-ietf.rss>).
Best regards,
Julian
