RE: AtomPub in browsers

["Brian Smith" <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeroen Hoekx wrote:
> [...] Windows Live Writer, which is great, but not 
> everyone can install it, let alone configure it properly (in 
> my experience)

What problems have you had with WLW? The main problem I've had is that a
limited user cannot install it. After that, WLW should basically configure
itself if it can find a complete manifest file (see
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb463265.aspx) and a service
document with exactly one collection that accepts application/atom+xml and
exactly one collection that accepts image/* and other media types.

> Browsers can upload files with a form as multipart/form-data. 
> Wouldn't it be possible to specify this behaviour in the 
> Multipart Media Creation draft? This would be far more useful 
> to 99,9% of the web today.

I was originally going to propose something like that as an alternative to
the multipart/related draft. However, if you have a multipart/form-data
interface for adding and editing media resources then you don't need AtomPub
at all, because you can use that same multipart/form-data interface for
adding and editing non-media entries too; just omit the media resource part
and leave the Atom entry part. RFC4287+RFC5005+the mutlipart/form-data
interface would be a superset of what AtomPub can do. You wouldn't need
AtomPub at all; in fact, it would be unRESTful to provide both interfaces.
In other words, a multipart/form-data interface would be more of an
alternative to AtomPub than an extension of AtomPub.

Regards,
Brian