On Wednesday, May 11, 2005, at 06:09 PM, Robert Sayre wrote:
On 5/11/05, Graham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:Note no one wants to ban title- only feeds if they come from title-only resources.
This is the problem I have. Title-only feeds are perfectly ok from any resource. They are probably not a good idea as the only possibility available from a blog or news site
This is an excellent way to state a large portion of my opinion on this subject. Let me see if I can state it completely and concisely:
1) I'd like to encourage people to publish useful feeds, and give them guidance about how to do so
2) I'd like to strongly encourage people to publish accessible feeds
The rest is details:
* What makes a feed useful?
-- In most cases, having enough content for it to be a reliable tool for deciding whether to follow a link to more content.
-- In some cases, having a nothing more than the consuming application is going to use--for example, a news headline ticker basically needs a headline, a link, and timestamp and an ID.
* How does one achieve the goal of publishing a useful feed?
-- For the most common case, include atom:summary or atom:content.
-- For the less common case, include neither atom:summary nor atom:content.
The two conflict with each other. Thus, I'd like to encourage people to at least publish a feed to cover the first case, but in no way prevent them from also publishing a stripped down version for the second case. If they really want to or only can, they should be allowed to only cover the second case.
* What makes a feed accessible?
-- If the feed has "content", including a textual version or summary of it in one of Atom's special formats ("text", "html" and "xhtml").
I think that captures what I would hope we can find language to achieve. I don't think we're going to achieve that by simply deciding between SHOULD and MAY.
On Wednesday, May 11, 2005, at 07:22 PM, Graham wrote:
On 12 May 2005, at 1:51 am, Bill de h�ra wrote:Bray voiced concerns about SHOULD; I suggested MAY. No further
discussion occurred. What might be wrong with a MAY requirement in this
case?
MAY is fine as the actual RFC term, but needs to be embellished, eg:
"atom:summary MAY be included, but software is encouraged to do so when atom:content is not present"
How about something along the lines of:
"atom:summary is OPTIONAL, but when atom:content is either not present, or when the value of its type attribute is anything other than "text", "html" or "xhtml", publishers are strongly encouraged to either include atom:summary, or publish another version of the feed which includes atom:summary or atom:content with one of the type attribute values listed above."
In the above, 'anything other than "text", "html" or "xhtml"' could be replaced by 'a MIME media type', and correspondingly "one of the type attribute values listed above" with something like 'a type attribute value of "text", "html" or "xhtml"'.
