On 8/4/05, Sam Ruby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I believe that the term "content" is open to intelligent dispute. > Apparently the authors of RFC3470/BCP70 believe so too.
Agree. > I won't dispute your read on the consensus of the working group Agree. > but I > would like to request that *SOME* language be present in the spec that > makes this clear. Agree. I'll also note that this requirement has basically zero value for a desktop aggragator. I have only written three or four Atom parsers, but I think the approach that has the best mix of performance and correctness is one where SAX events are treated as input events for a scanner-like state machine. Leading and trailing whitespace input for these fields should be discarded by a robust scanner, and doing so proposes no risk to compliant feeds, unlike guessing the "true meaning" of an ampersand in an RSS feed. So, it will be my recommendation to ignore this MUST-level requirement of the Atom spec in any consumer aggregator that I contribute to. I think it might be useful as bozo filter in an Atom protocol server, because the lazy thing for client implementors to do is find a decent serialization library. The lazy thing for publishers to do is concatenate strings in their loosely-typed language of choice. Robert Sayre