Graham Parks wrote:
On 16 Jan 2006, at 4:59 pm, James Holderness wrote:
Now since Atom 0.3 is still a whole lot more widely used than Atom 1.0,
you can be fairly sure than anyone that bothers to handle XML content at
all will be capable of handling type="application/xhtml+xml" containing
xhtml fragments.
Speak for yourself.
I was speaking from experience having tested several different Atom
aggregators. And I wasn't making any guarantees about anything. I just said
you could be *fairly* sure that applications would support xhtml fragments.
For example, below are the results of some tests I've run on 15 aggregators.
The tests included the use of a <div> tag as the root element, a <p> tag as
the root element, and an <html> tag as the root element (i.e. a complete
xhtml document).
The following applications worked with all three tests:
BlogBridge 2.7
Bloglines
BottomFeeder 4.1
Google Reader
Snarfer 0.1.2
The following applications worked with the <div> tag and the <p> tag, but
failed to handle a full document (the <html> tag):
FeedDemon 1.5
GreatNews 1.0.0.354
Newz Crawler 1.8.0
RSS Bandit 1.3.0.38
SharpReader 0.9.6.0
The following applications couldn't display any of the entries:
JetBrains Omea 2.0
Netvibes
Newsgator Online
RSSOwl 1.2
Thunderbird 1.6a1 (wouldn't subscribe)
Draw your own conclusions.
It's crappy assumptions like this that made RSS hellish to work with.
Atom is unambiguous. "application/xhtml+xml" means the page content is a
full standalone web page.
Not true. Atom *recommends* that the page content is a full standalone web
page. It's not a requirement. Clearly Atom isn't as free of assumptions as
you might have hoped. It sure isn't any less hellish to work with.
Regards
James
