>To turn it a bit around: Would you ever want to subscribe to a single Atom >Entry? If not, wouldn't it be good to know that it was an Atom Entry and >not an Atom Feed before you started subscribing to it?
This is misleading wording (and maybe part of the overall problem)! Following a link is not the same thing as subscribing to something. The act of subscribing is a local activity performed by the user agent. What you do when you follow the link to a feed is a GET. Your agent then decides if subscribing to that resource is a good idea. To make that decision, the agent has to look at the representation and the it is insignificant overhead to see if the thing returnes <feed> or <entry>. Anyhow, why not monitor a single entry? I think this is far more a user agent configuration issue than it is a problem of the media type being returned. FWIW, I think the question of media type (or the feed-ness of some resource) and the issue of whether to subscribe or not are completely orthogonal. Maybe I want to monitor a single media resource; an Atom media entry would be an ideal thing to do so (I'd rather look at the meta data than at the media resource upon each poll). I'd say: stick with the one media type that is currently there - there is no problem, just misconception about what it means to subscribe. Jan
