On May 19, 2009, at 2:12 AM, Sylvain Hellegouarch wrote:
Won't the extensions be ignored by a server that doesn't want them?The media type parameter is for use primarily in the app:accept signaling. If a server doesn't require it or doesn't understand it, it can safely ignore it.Yes, I know. Don't use the app:accept signaling. AFAICT, there is no need to do so. Just send the AtomPub/HTTP message to the server.Wait a second. There's a reason we have app:accept. Are you indicatingthat they are irrelevant? You can always check whether a certain method can be used on a certain resource. However, the app:accept metadata tells you in advance what is likely to happen so you can decide whether or not to attempt an operation. Not every feed is an AtomPub collection, even if it is coming from an AtomPub server.Well app:accept is not an element of the feed anyway. It's part of the service document so collection feeds aren't really differentiable from other feed types in that fashion.
Please see discussion on best practice for discovering collections [1] for details. We are proposing to formalize this best practice in the hierarchy I-D [2]. I also have a blog post that describes this [3].
app:accept is merely informative to be fair since the server might decideto reject or even accept a media-type it did or didn't advertise usingapp:accept. Obviously it's better if servers do as they say but I doubtthe spec. forces them to do so.
Of course. That doesn't diminish the value of app:accept. This metadata serves as a warning only.
Nikunj Mehta http://o-micron.blogspot.com [1] http://www.imc.org/atom-protocol/mail-archive/msg11349.html [2] http://ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-divilly-atompub-hierarchy-00.txt [3] http://o-micron.blogspot.com/2009/05/discovering-atompub-collections-best.html