Robert Sayre wrote: > 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've said it twice; don't take it personally it's not an attack. > 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. The siutation didn't just happen to be vague, we made it vague, I don't agree it doesn't matter, and if the Atom spec can't get it's story straight on whitespace to the extent one of the editors is going to advise people to ignore a MUST directive that one of the chairs and others believes has strong consensus support from the WG, then I firmly believe that puts detailed information on whitespace on the table. Finally, if there is a Purpose Of Atom I suspect it has something to do with clarity and unambiguity in specification - and this is not it. > 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. I read that as saying we have a broken spec. If there's another way to read it, help me out. This entire thread is like being in a Joseph Heller novel, except its called Catch-32. cheers Bill
