On Feb 24, 2006, at 3:05 PM, Sean Lyndersay wrote:
I'm sure that many people -- on this list in particular -- think that the right thing to do is to normalize to Atom 1.0, instead. Yep, that's certainly one way to think about it. But then I'd be having this same discussion with Dave and with folks on rss- public. :) In short, I'd rather avoid the issue altogether and provide some value to the developers who are using the platform -- which means preventing them from having to learn several different formats to get common data, while allowing them to get access to extensions.
Given that Atom 1.0, in practice, is a clean superset of RSS 2.0 (there are things in RSS 2.0 that aren't in Atom, but they are typically not used; see http://www.tbray.org/atom/RSS-and-Atom), the only one that's been through a formal standardization process, and the only that's guaranteed not to change (see IETF rules) this feels a little weird. But it's your API.
I will say, though, that there are already a lot of Atom 1.0 feeds and there are going to be more, so it does seem like a basic requirement that your interface be able to model Atom 1.0 accurately without data loss. I assume you agree that a failure to do this would be a bug. -Tim
