Thomas Broyer wrote:
atom:rights at feed-level don't apply to its entries, just to the feed as it stands. If you want to grant/restrict rights at an entry-level, use the entry-level atom:rights.
Ok, I missed that. For some reason I assumed atom:rights was just a feed-level element (probably thinking of RSS). However, according to the spec it's perfectly acceptable to use a feed-level rights element to grant rights at an entry-level (assuming all your entries are meant to have the same rights).
I can understand how an entry-level atom:rights could be presented to the end-user, but I can't imagine how it could be done for the feed-level atom:rights, given that it can change during the feed's "life". The only solution I can see is to store feed metadata on an atom:source inside each entry, so you can ask for the entry-level and feed-level atom:rights for each entry in your aggregator.
If I'm going to have to deal with rights on a per-entry basis, I think I'd probably just ignore the concept of feed-level rights. That's not to say I'd ignore the feed-level element altogether - I'd consider it a default to be used if there wasn't an atom:rights element at the entry-level. However, if they're both included I'd ignore the feed-level element. I don't think that's inconsistent with section 4.2.10 of the spec.
As for how this applies to the history extension: if the first document retrieved contained a feed-level atom:rights element, but documents linked via fh:prev contained no rights (feed-level or entry-level), I would probably apply the rights from the first document rather than assigning no rights at all. Of course that's where the "security flaw" comes in, but perhaps that's my own fault.
Aggregators are more likely to copy/paste de feed-level authors into each entry and totally forget about feed-level ones.
I'm not sure if you meant "totally forget about the entry-level ones". If that's the case, as a user I wouldn't be very pleased with the aggregator. Most blogs may only have one author per feed, but that's certainly not the case for all feeds. Group blogs, comment feeds, forums, mailing-lists, slashdot - there are plenty of cases where entry-level authors are used.
Regards James
