summary markup (Re: Atom 0.2 feedback

[Tom Myers <tommyers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sam Ruby wrote:

> Tim Bray wrote:
>
> > 1. allow markup in <summary>.  Does this require that we support mode=
> >    as with content?  Alternatively support a small subset of XHTML?
> >    Both seem ugly.
>
> Ultimately, I expect that there will be people who will want to have 
> markup on their titles.  And author/name.  Trying to legislate against 
> this will be foolish as they will do it anyway.  ...
>
> Of course, all textual elements need to support plain text.  When markup 
> is present, it may be well formed, or not.
>
> Do you have a suggestion for a less ugly syntax for addressing these needs?

Maybe this has already been suggested, criticized, and dropped, but...

Even if markup tags are successfully forbidden, then in particular I
expect that some will try to emphasize words in titles with conventions
like _underscore_ and *star* and so forth to say
  *this* will _not_ confuse an /XML parser/...
They will do it anyway, as you say. Conventions then can be
as simple as the three mark-pairs I just used, or as complex as the
syntax of http://intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/HelpOnEditing; consider
what can be done in one line of a wiki.
  Suppose the spec says that summary markup tags are never permitted,
 but here is Convention X by which people can indicate emphasis,
 and interactive clients _may_ either (a) ignore such markup, or
(b) strip it out for plain "this will not confuse an XML parser", or
(c) display the text with emphasis as indicated by Convention X.

In other words, support is optional, but there's a predefined direction
for support to go in, if enough customers want to do/view such emphases.
I dunno if this is more or less ugly, but it won't create XML parsing
issues and it won't create sophisticated-HTML security issues and yet
it doesn't require defining a new syntax, just including existing stuff.

Tom Myers