Eric Scheid wrote:
But I'm not so sure it's valid now, because of the SHOULD clause below:
I suppose technically it is valid since a SHOULD is a recommendation not a
requirement, but you'd need a very good reason for not following that
recommendation.
For example, an OPML document requires <opml> as the root, which contains
<head> and <body>, the latter containing <outline> elements ... so can an
atom entry contain just an <opml:outline> element?
<entry>
...
<entry type="whatever OPML's type is">
<opml:outline xmlns:opml="whatever.." ... />
</entry>
</entry>
As I said above, it's probably technically valid, but not advisable. When
you think about it, the most obvious behaviour for an Atom processor
encountering a document type that it doesn't understand would be to write it
to a file and fire up whatever application has been registered with the
operating system for handling that type. In most cases that will only work
if the file is complete.
Thus, can atom be used to ship around parcels of xml snippets? I suppose
it
could, but only so long as both ends knew what was going on, and knew
naïve
atom processors might barf on the incomplete xml, right?
The one time I'd think it might be safe is with XHTML (as I mentioned in a
previous message) since Atom processors are already required to handle XHTML
fragments in the content element. Anything else would be highly risky unless
it was a proprietary feed communicating between two known applications.
Regards
James
