I've had a hard time following this thread, but for what its worth I
buy Tim's reasoning.
+1
On May 23, 2006, at 12:26 PM, James M Snell wrote:
+1. What Tim said.
- James
Tim Bray wrote:
On May 18, 2006, at 6:15 AM, David Powell wrote:
What I see as a problem is that reasonable implementations will not
preserve Atom documents bit-for-bit, so they will need to explicitly
support this draft if they don't want to corrupt data by dropping
the
thr:count attributes. By the letter of RFC4287 there is no problem
with the draft, but practically there is something like a layering
concern if an extension requires existing conformant implementations
to be changed.
At the end of the day, the marketplace will work within the
constraints
of what 4287 allows; my feeling is that there are going to be a
ton of
extensions that will attach unforeseen metadata at arbitrary
points with
Atom documents, and implementations that fail to store these and make
them retrievable will quickly be seen as broken. -Tim
I notice that you said "implemented support" - that is fine for
user-agents etc, but I don't believe that Atom infrastructure should
be required to "implement support" for each new bit of content that
publishers put into their feeds.
On the contrary; I think that implementors who fail to deal with the
fact that people will be adding their own non-Atom stuff at every
conceivable place in an Atom feed are being very stupid, because this
will happen whatever we say. -Tim
