Subject: Re: partial xml in atom:content ?

From: Robert Sayre <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2006 11:35:48 -0500

>> It's crappy assumptions like this that made RSS hellish to work with. Atom is
>> unambiguous. "application/xhtml+xml" means the page content is a full
>>standalone web page.
>
> Not true. Atom *recommends* that the page content is a full standalone web
> page. It's not a requirement.

Atom also says that you should expect it not to work.

> Clearly Atom isn't as free of assumptions as you
> might have hoped. It sure isn't any less hellish to work with.

This has not been my experience.  In Thunderbird, there's been one bug
filed against the Atom 1.0 parser I wrote in two hours, and that bug
was undeniably supported by the spec.

I guess you can make it just as hard if you really try. The typed
variants of the content element are an extension point. You could put
application/xaml+xml in there, but I wouldn't expect many aggregators
to support it. It is, however, accurately labeled.

--

Robert Sayre

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

---

From: "James Holderness" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2006 20:46:59 -0000

> Atom also says that you should expect it not to work.

You shouldn't expect any MIME types to work, or specifically MIME types that 
aren't full standalone documents?

> to support it. It is, however, accurately labeled.

I wouldn't either, but I wouldn't expect an Atom aggregator to fail to 
subscribe to such a feed, which is what happened to Thunderbird on my test 
feed [1]. To be more precise, I clicked on "Manage subscriptions", "Add", 
entered the url, checked the "Show the article summary" box, and then 
clicked OK. It just sat there in the "RSS subscriptions" dialog saying 
"Verifying the RSS feed..." and never finished. If I close the dialog, it 
asks "Are you sure you wish to cancel subscribing to the current feed?". 
Version 1.6a1 (20051213) on Windows XP SP2.

Regards
James

[1] http://216.93.169.119/atomtests/applicationxml/everything.atom