Mark Nottingham wrote:
Thanks for the feedback. As I've explained before, I have a pretty strong preference for the current design, to make it usable in other formats; i.e., the scope of this is not just Atom (which is why I'm probably going to do it as an Individual submission).
At first I thought this was a good idea, but I'm starting to have second thoughts. The spec as it stands is fine for RSS 2, but I can see a lot of Atom people thinking that you should be using atom:link (as Henry suggested) and not wanting to "corrupt" their nice new format. No doubt the RSS 1 folks have their own preference for where this should be going and will probably be even more adamant that you do things the correct way (not sure what that might be - something using dc:relation maybe?) I would worry that if they don't like it, they won't use it.
implementors to special-case their code; i.e., they'd have to look for one element if it's an RSS feed, and a different element if it's an Atom feed. I know this is already done widely, but I see no reason to artificially require the practice here. However, if a number of implementors stand up and say that they wouldn't mind such a special case, and no one is against it, I'd make the change.
I'm not exactly a high profile implementor, so my opinion may not matter much, but I personally wouldn't have a problem with it. I already keep the Atom code separate from RSS with the hope that one day the RSS can be thrown away, so this really wouldn't affect me at all.
I'm surprised nobody else has commented though. To me this seems like one of the most important extensions to Atom/RSS, and yet there aren't exactly hordes of people rushing to implement it or at least committing to do something once it's officially released. Or have I just missed previous discussions on the subject?
Regards James
