Re: Handling unknown elements in an entry

[Robert Sayre <mint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> --- Robert Sayre <mint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > OK, what if they drop atom:summary on the floor?
>
>
> Some blog tools don't support summaries so I'd expect
> them to drop them on the floor. Some blog tools don't
> support user specified dates and will drop them on the
> floor. For example, MSN Spaces doesn't support either
> one of the above. 

Depends on what you mean by "support". There's never an expectation that 
everything in an entry will result in some behavior on the public facing 
site. There's always an undefined piece of code turning entries into 
pages -- Movable Type lets semi-technical users control this with 
templates, MSN Spaces has predefined templates. There will always be a 
black box in there.

It's probably more productive to look at this as a storage operation. We 
need to define the extent to which clients can expect to pick up what 
they drop off. For example, storing atom:summary wouldn't be a guarantee 
that it's useful on the site, but at least it would continue to be 
present in the editor.

> However it is a significant burden for clients because
> it means they'll have to know every single entry
> element supported by every single blog service they
> support posting to. I'd find this to be just as bad as
> the MetaWeblog API mess that we have today. 

Yes, it would be, if we insist that elements directly reflect some 
property of the site instead of treating them as stored annotations.

Am I making sense?

Robert Sayre