On Aug 4, 2005, at 6:53 AM, Robert Sayre wrote:
I propose trying harder, but I am open to "just fail".
As am I. I am not OK with a long treatise on whitespace, like the one
Tim suggested. If there is a MUST-breaking error in a feed, that's not
an Atom document and I don't want to talk about it. I slightly prefer
documenting and allowing what the world's PHP scripts have been
observed to produce, but either way is fine. BTW, my proposed text was
taken from HTML 4.01.
I'm getting increasingly grumpy and "just fail" is looking better and
better. The current normative text, "The element's content MUST be
an IRI", is clear and simple and supported by other well-understood
normative text, supported by lots of interoperable software, that
make the meanings of "element", "content", and "IRI" not really open
to intelligent dispute. I claim that text enjoyed strong, not rough,
consensus support from the WG.
So my preferred course of action would be to leave it the way it
bloody well is. The Feed validator should throw whitespace-polluted
pseudo-Atom on the floor, and if some bozos persist in producing it,
and some implementors decide to work around this error, well, that's
the way the Internet is. But if a couple of leading implementations
decide to be strict, and the producers develop a culture of Doing The
Right Thing, well then, that's the way the Internet is too,
sometimes. PHP is, if nothing else, flexible and friendly to quick
changes in deployed scripts, I can hear a zillion publishing-system
hackers grumbling "Oh, it's that damn tight-assed Atom stuff, guess I
have to use mod_finicky here".
So for now, I'm -1 on an weakening or removing "The element's content
MUST be an IRI" or analogous text in any other section. I'll stop
shouting if I'm in a small minority here. -Tim
