The Atom API is just for blogs? Perception vs. reality

["Mark Stanton" <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey All

Further to my previous posts (on Atom & general web publishing -
http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg03198.html) I've been
chatting to pretty much anyone I can get to listen and just seeing if the
idea has legs. A couple of points have been raised that I can't conclusively
answer. If anyone can help me out here I'd appreciate it....

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Firstly is Atom just for blogs? If so fine, that solves all my problems & we
can all get on with our lives. If not, then what is it for? 

If the answer to this is general publishing or "completing the original
vision of the Web as a writable, collaborative medium" I would suggest that
some of the Atom material is misleading the general public. There is a
strong perception out there that Atom is just blog related - even the use of
simple words like "entry" might need to be rethought because of the implied
connection with blogging (perhaps "article" is more appropriate?).

I guess what I am saying is that if the plan here is for a tool that goes
beyond the world of blogs, you should probably be aware that there is
already a lot of misconception out there.

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I've also started looking at WebDAV & how it relates to the Atom project.
Everything I can find is fairly inconclusive to say the least. I have almost
no knowledge of WebDAV, but have gone over a few old posts on the list & the
http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/WebDav page.

Should I just be looking at WebDAV or is Atom going to be solving some real
issues that currently exist in the WebDAV implementation?

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Lastly I just wanted to run a use case by you and see if Atom was able to
handle it. 

Bob is a non-technical department employee at in medium sized government
department. The department has a web site that uses hypothetical AtomEnabled
CMS ABC. Bob has hypothetical AtomEnabled Authoring Tool XYZ installed on
his desktop.

Bob needs to create a new page to provide information on an upcoming Easter
barbeque. The page is going to contain HTML content & an image. Bob knocks
up his image is his WhizzBang Image Editor & saves it to his desktop. He
opens his authoring tool, selects a template and enters his text content,
studiously highlighting blocks of text and converting them to headings and
bullet lists and so on. He then clicks his insert image button, browses to
his desktop & inserts the picture into the top right of his content area.
Bob checks his work & is happy with what he has done. He hits his "Submit
Content" button and off goes his content, transferred via the Atom API to
his content management system.

The ABC CMS accepts this new version, logs the change and enters the content
version into a workflow queue prior to publishing it on the live site.

Is this scenario theoretically possible? How would Atom handle the transfer
of the binary image data along with the text/html content? Is this getting
into WebDAV territory?



Cheers

Mark


PS: AFAICT http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/ is not being indexed
by Google.