On Jan 15, 2006, at 8:09 PM, James Holderness wrote:
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.
Processing type="xhtml" and type="application/xhtml+xml" are very
different beasts. Say your application converts Atom feeds to HTML
to display in webpages. With type="xhtml", the data could just be
dumped into the webpage (after appropriate stripping of nasty tags
and CSS and such). With type="application/xhtml+xml", you'd have to
figure out to do with everything outside of the <body> element. If
there's CSS involved for example, simply throwing it away could lead
to some very messed up display. But assuming your application is
being called from within the webpage, it's not going to have the
opportunity to add a <style> section to the document's <head>. So to
avoid losing the styling, for example, it would have to replace all
id="foo" and class="bar" attributes with style="all of the styling
for the id and class and parent classes, etc., with all cascading
applied". In other words, it's not going to happen. Given the
tremendously increased complexity involved, some apps are likely to
refuse to process anything that's not one of Atom's three special types.
