Though I definitely understand (and applaud) the eagerness to get an hAtom format defined, things have definitely been rushed a bit, and there are holes in the background research necessary to do a good job. Holes which, if they were filled, would most likely result in quite a few changes to the hAtom proposal.
For example: http://microformats.org/wiki/blog-post-formats 1. The formats page has yet to describe "basic structure of an RSS document". This is a glaring hole. Given how much more established RSS 2.0 is over Atom in the space of "syndication", it needs to be taken a lot more seriously than that. 2. The formats page omits another old "blog post" standard - VJOURNAL. I believe Outlook supports VJOURNAL, and if so, greatly outnumbers all RSS readers combined. I've at least added a starter section for VJOURNAL: http://microformats.org/wiki/blog-post-formats#VJOURNAL One of the larger points here to consider is: Just because other standards keep inventing new terms for the same thing, doesn't mean we should. Who knows why they invented new terms? The simplest explanation is that they just didn't know any better. Did they do as much research into existing standards? If so, then you should be able to find URLs to that research which we should eagerly reuse. We should actively AVOID inventing new terms for the same thing, even if those "new terms" come from other standards. The utility of hAtom comes from the 1:1 correspondence of Atom elements to hAtom class names. This does not mean that the names have to be the same. In fact, we should be preferring names from previous microformats, and even previous standards over new names introduced by Atom. As long as it is made clear which hAtom class name translates into which Atom element name, the goal of creating a 1:1 representation of hAtom in XHTML is achieved. Thanks, Tantek _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
