Wednesday, September 6, 2006, 11:38:13 AM, you wrote:
> So, here's the proposal: > - Use <link rel="license"/> for entry licenses -- either on the feed > level, setting a default analogous to what atom:rights does, or on > the element level. I think that there are data modelling issues with this approach. I don't think that the inheritance of extensions from the 'feed document', to the entries contained within that document is supported by the spec, nor would it be likely to be supported by typical implementations of stateful feed stores, frameworks and APIs. Feeds and entries are seperate entities with seperate life-cycles. Stateful feed platforms, such as the Windows feed platform, typically store a single instance of feed metadata, and a single instance of entry metadata. When, for example, a feed title changes, the change applies to the feed as a whole; it isn't localised to only apply to the entries that were present in that feed document at the time of the change, because each entry doesn't typically store its own private copy of feed metadata. Implementors can cope with the inheritance of atom:rights and atom:author, because it is explicitly described in the spec, and implementors know that they must implement the inheritance at the document parsing stage, and apply the feed-level data to the entry before storing the entry before they attempt to store the entries in a database or whatever, but implementations cannot be expected to apply all feed-level extensions to the entries that they were transmitted with, just in case any of them might expect to implement feed document inheritance. Feed properties are properties of the feed, not the feed document. An extension can't implement atom:rights/atom:author style inheritance from the feed document to the contained entries. -- Dave
