Re: MUST a collection be returned as an Atom feed?

[Subbu Allamaraju <subbu@xxxxxxxxx>]

It does not prohibit the resource to be represented as something else, and so, there is no reason for the client to assume the media type.

On Dec 28, 2009, at 5:33 AM, Jan Algermissen wrote:

> 
> I have raised the following issue on rest-discuss in various forms already. Excuse me for bringing it up on this list again. I am just curious what people here think.
> 
> RFC 5023 says:
>  "Collection - A Resource that contains a set of Member Resources. Collections are represented as Atom Feeds."[1]
> Does that mean that an AtomPub server MUST be (at least) respond to a GET on a collection URI with an Atom feed
> representation?
> 
> I am asking because I consider that to be too constraining. The client should not be able to make such an assumption. It should discover at runtime that the response is application/atom+xml rather than expect it to be prior to the request.
> Jan
> 
> [1]http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5023#section-3
>