I'm in the process of developing a PHP library for managing
collections of news links. The library is intended for generating RSS
or Atom feeds, and also for formatting lists of news articles for use
in web pages.
You can see one example of its use at:
http://www.sexworkersproject.org/press/
A second can be seen at
http://new.raingod.com-REMOVETHIS-/angus/Gallery/Photos/SouthAmerica/Peru/IncaTrail/IncaTrailNews.php
(please excuse the '-REMOVETHIS-' in the link above, but that site is
still heavily under development and I'm not yet ready to have it
crawled by anything that happens to visit the microformats.org
archives).
These lists of articles - which are essentially 'feeds' - seem like
an obvious match for hAtom, so I've tried to make the library produce
hAtom. However, there are some problems.
First, hAtom demands an author - either at the entry level, or at the
feed level - and in these two use cases, there's no obvious author.
In the case of the Inca Trail collection, the articles linked to
sometimes have authors and sometimes don't. I could put myself as the
'author' of the collection as a whole, but I'm not sure that makes
strict sense.
Second, hAtom demands 'entry-content' and makes 'entry-summary'
optional. In the first example, there's neither content nor summary
(because that's how the client wants it). In the second, the text is
really more in the nature of a summary than content, but content is
the required item.
Finally, the articles all have a 'source' (i.e. the publication where
they appeared), but I'm unclear on how to represent that in hAtom.
What's the best course of action in cases like these? My use-case
doesn't exactly fit hAtom because it doesn't meet the mandatory
'author' and 'content' requirements. But at the same time, it looks
as if hAtom fits better than anything else. Should I
a. Force my listings into the hAtom mold, by calling the summaries
'content' (and putting in an empty content block in the first case),
and adding an author somehow, or
b. Avoid using hAtom at all, on the grounds that if I can't meet the
requirements, I shouldn't deceive innocent robots by promising them
hAtom and not delivering?
Thanks,
Angus
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