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Re: DontSyndicate Pace




My reply on-wiki:


This doesn't feel right; it's publishing-specific (i.e., you'd never see it in a feed), which makes me suspect there's a better way to do it. It also has some very implementation-specific semantics; if we try to specify this generically, we'll end up constraining the behaviour of other Web resources when we upload a resource with this attribute.

I'd much rather have a different kind of interaction that allows this; i.e., if you want to upload a movie or picture, PUT or POST to a different URI. It would be simple to come up with a new link type that pointed at an acceptable place to do so. If we based the API on WebDAV, this would be exceptionally easy to do.

That said, I thought the purpose of multipart/alternative was to allow different representations of a resource to be included in a feed; e.g., plain text vs. XHTML. I agree that multipart is a horrible way to do this, when we could just have multiple content elements, each with a different media type.


On Apr 17, 2004, at 2:39 PM, Tim Bray wrote:



Pardon for not announcing sooner; my ISP decided that imc.org was on some spamcop list, so I got un-subbed, so I re-subbed under my Sun address.
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I've been unhappy for some time about the multipart/alternative construct in the current syntax & protocol. Among other things, I'd like to use Atom to post a picture to my blog, but then I want to reference the picture from an ordinary HTML post rather than have it show up itself in the syndication feed. So I proposed adding syndicate="true|false" to <atom:entry>, so that you can do non-syndicated posts (I assume this would be used mostly in POSTS to the feed rather than GETS of it).

I'm trying to make something that is (a) simpler, (b) more web-friendly, and (c) fits better with the way posts are naturally constructed.

If this works, I think it removes most of the use-cases for

<content type="multipart/alternative">

so I nuked that as part of the proposal, which is at http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/PaceDontSyndicate

More remarks on my blog at http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/04/16/HowToPost -Tim


-- Mark Nottingham http://www.mnot.net/