* Tim Bray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005-08-23 02:35]: > 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
Hmm. That’s the first really solid pro-single-doc argument I see… And one I don’t think can be argued about, /realistically/. • The ^L separation makes a lot of sense for logfiles, but less so for TCP-carried connections which ensure a basic level of data integrity. (With logfiles on disk all bets are off.) • “Just discard the last incomplete document” logic can be implemented without require separate documents by processing and flushing the stack so far whenever an atom:entry start-element event is seen. I still dislike the idea of a “virtual closing tag” – it ain’t 1995 anymore, after all. And I still think separate documents would be cleaner and would require a bit less special case logic to process. But this *is* an application where saving bytes is a serious enough concern, and I suppose that so long as the only thing missing is exactly one atom:feed end-element event, the special case is simple enough that I guess it’s acceptable. Ugh. Reality. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
