Quoting Tim Bray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >Right, but anyone who reads a simple extension out of an Atom feed >and finds something they consider to be a relative URI reference, and >wants to absolutize the reference, either uses the base URI as >established by xml:base, or they are wrong. -Tim >
I wasn't suggesting that we needed special xml:base rules. My point was that it is not legal for an extension to define its content to be a (relative) URIRef. (although it is ok for an extension to contain an absolute URI.) Simple Extensions are designed to be a simple class of extension that generic support can be implemented for fairly easily in publishing clients and servers. They are intended to be name/value pairs that can be stored outside of an Atom Infoset. Generic processing is the reason that the distinction between Simple and Structured extensions exists. Generic processing, for implementations with database or RDF backends, can't be implemented if you need to know whether each extension contains a URIRef or text before putting the extension in your database. You can't put URIRefs in Simple Extension Elements because some implementations will not preserve their base URI (which is legal behavior, because the spec defines them to contain plain strings, not URIRefs.) I think that this is already implied by the spec, but it obviously isn't very clear. -- Dave
