On Mon, 22 Aug 2005, Tim Bray wrote:
On Aug 22, 2005, at 7:26 AM, Joe Gregorio wrote:
Essentially, LiveJournal is making this data available to anybody who
wishes to access it, without any need to register or to invent a unique
API.
Ahh, I had thought this was a more dedicated ping traffic stream. The
never ending Atom document makes much more sense now.
It's got another advantage. You connect and ask for the feed. You get
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom";>
....... goes on forever ........
and none of the entry documents need to redeclare the Atom namespace, which
saves quite a few bytes after the first hundred thousand or so entries. -Tim
I'm a little confused by all this discussion of never-ending XML
documents, mainly because my understanding is that without the
well-formedness checks the content might as well be free form, and the
elements within the document may rely on parts that have 'yet to arrive'.
Taking as an example the atom:author element, with the above example of a
never-ending document any atom:entry elements which exist would be quite
valid in containing no atom:author element because they're not required to
have one if the atom:feed element contains such an author. And because the
feed has not yet finished the reading application cannot know that the
document is invalid (or not - the atom:author element may arrive at some
point in the future).
What I'm trying to say is that a never-ending 'atom' feed is ...
* not parsable as XML because it is not well-formed
* not parsable as Atom because the Atom constraints may not be
satisfiable (the author example is what I'm thinking of)
For very specialist use it might be sensible, but as Atom and XML are
quite well defined as to what they contain and such a stream isn't Atom or
XML.
--
Gerph <http://gerph.org/>
... I need a friend, to make me happy; Not stand here on my own.
