Thought experiment

[Tim Bray <Tim.Bray@xxxxxxx>]

Flash forward a few months; Atom 1.0 is done, lots of implementations 
are out there, everybody's happy, and big-time deployment starts.  So, 
how are Atom feeds going to get deployed?  I see the following common 
cases:

1. They'll be deployed by competent people who know how things work, 
and served as application/atom+xml
2. They'll be served by people who don't know that stuff or don't 
control their web server, and:
2.a. they'll be named whatever.atom, and based on Apache's defaults, 
end up being served as text/plain, or
2.b they'll be named whatever.xml and based on Apache's defaults, end 
up being served as text/xml, unless
2.c they have a really recent Apache, in which case they'll be served 
as application/xml

<sidenote>People of Earth to Greg Stein: could we change the Apache 
default media type for ".atom" to "application/atom+xml" ASAP, like 
right now, as a gesture in the right direction?</sidenote>

So, the question we face, in the context of PaceMustBeWellFormed and 
PaceShouldBeWellFormed, is "how big a problem do we have?"  I.e. how 
many feeds end up in 2.a or 2.b above?  In the case of RSS, it's pretty 
ugly, see Mark's numbers: 
http://imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg05588.html.

I wonder if we could convince ourselves that if we mounted a really 
vigorous publicity campaign, i.e. we all agree, for the next few 
months, whenever we're talking to a co-worker or a journo or from a 
conference stage, to say never say "Atom" without, within the next 45 
seconds, also saying "which as we all know must be served as 
application/atom+xml or it won't work"; I wonder, as I say, if we all 
did that, whether the proportion in categories 2.a and 2.b above might 
be small enough that we could not worry about it?  -Tim