On 8/5/05, Bill de hÓra <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If you're going to recommend ignoring it in practice, why not recommend > throwing it out? Why equivocate?
You keep saying "equivocate", as if there were some hard-to-swallow truth I'm avoiding. I'm suggesting saying something vague because the situation is vague, it doesn't matter very much, and I don't consider detailed information oh whitespace in XML feeds to be the Purpose Of Atom. I'm going to recommend ignoring it to people writing Atom processors with the intent of consuming a wide variety of feeds for consumer usage. My favorite use case is Grandmother Trying To View Pictures Of Her Grandchildren. Am I going to prevent that from happening in order enforce a whitespace rule? Since there are no compliant feeds I'm hurting, it's an easy decision to make. That said, I know from experience that it's very easy to write an Atom Processor that would choke on such whitespace. I would like for those processors to be supported by the spec as compliant, because writing one should not have to be an exercise in Keep-Going-No-Matter-What consumer software in all cases. I don't really care how they are supported (MAY, SHOULD, MUST...), because it doesn't matter. We do need to write something that lets the feed validator warn people about it, but actually trying to enforce a MUST-level requirement here seems like pissing into the wind. Robert Sayre
