Saturday, June 18, 2005, 7:16:50 PM, Tim Bray wrote:
>>> My feeling was that we ruled out composite types in *local* content >>> [...] >>> >> >> I'm still looking, but my suspicion is that we never did rule them >> out, and that this restriction crept in during some editorial >> rephrasing. > <co-chair-mode>I disagree. Atom 0.3 had explicit built-in support > for multipart, and there was strong (not rough) consensus support for > retiring that and replacing it with the language in the current draft. <process-objection> I disagree with the co-chair's call. Yes, the Atom 0.3 "support" for multipart was broken and there was strong consensus for removing it, as in the text of drafts 03 to 07. But, there doesn't seem to have been any discussion or consensus whatsoever for the prohibition of composite MIME types in content, such as message/*, that was introduced in 08. In fact the conclusion of the debate that Robert pointed to [1], was that the types allowed by atom:content remained unrestricted. </process-objection> Atom 0.3 multiparts forced a dubious and complex processing model on everyone wanting to process Atom documents. This problem was solved by their removal in the 03 to 07 drafts. The prohibition of composite types in the 08 draft (made many months later) is something quite different. Composite types don't impose any change in the processing model of user-agents, they are just blobs that get passed to a MIME processor; there is no justification for restricting Atom payloads to a subset of the MIME type space. The restriction is just arbitrary: it disallows MHTML Word documents and RFC822 emails, but allows application/msword Word documents and application/zip. Let's be clear: composites probably won't be used by bloggers, or supported by blogging aggregators; but this isn't an excuse for this explicit blanket ban. > My recollection of the debate is that it was exclusively focused on > the problems of multipart in the document, thus I proposed to the WG > that we did not in fact have consensus of banning it in external > content; the feedback so far is supportive of the notion that that's > a bug in the spec. The earlier debate was on the problems in the 02 draft, which were solved in the 03 draft. The restriction on the payload of atom:content made in the 08 draft is a different issue, so the context of the earlier debate isn't relevant. [1] http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg09357.html -- Dave
