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

[Joe Gregorio <joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In theory, yes, you could put lots of different representations there
and then do
content negotiation. But I would advise against that:

   http://bitworking.org/news/WebServicesAndContentNegotiation

   Thanks,
   -joe

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Jan Algermissen
<algermissen1971@xxxxxxx> 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
>
>