Atom extensibility

[Henry Story <henry.story@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for the encouragement.

But I think this is not just something that can happen completely 
independently. Extensibility is part of the Atom Charter, so this is in 
fact important to Atom in a much more central way.

The question is exactly how should the interesting discovery that an 
Atom document is an RDF document [Ø] be used to fulfill the charter 
requirements on extensibility?
Clearly it could completely underpin the extensibility framework, and 
so allow the Atom charter to be successfully fulfilled.

I am in agreement with Danny's recent post [1] that something has to go 
in the charter that guides this relationship.

I have some ideas on how this could be done, but I would rather just 
ask the question in this post, and not confuse the issue with 
potentially misguided solutions to the problem.

So perhaps we can open this thread as a place to post ideas on the 
topic.

Henry Story


[Ø] though it still remains to be formally proven
[1] A similar question was just asked by Danny Ayers
http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg11918.html
[2] http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg11909.html

On 6 Jan 2005, at 19:27, Paul Hoffman  wrote [2]:
> At 6:43 PM +0100 1/6/05, Henry Story wrote:
> > To restate my point in your terms I believe I have shown that your 
> > point (4) is currently true. Ie (4) is not a future. It is currently 
> > and actually true.
> >
> > Like RSS1.0 Atom is a constrained form of RDF. But unlike RSS1.0 it 
> > is very inconspicuously so. IE. Anyone just looking at atom would 
> > never guess that it is RDF.
> >
> > I have tried to show this in an e-mail [1] to this list. Of course it 
> > would require more work to show this definitively to be the case. I 
> > have not gone through the details of this work because I'd like to 
> > have the backing of the group to do this officially, before I spend 
> > too much time on it. Also I would probably find a  lot of people a 
> > lot more knowledgeable than me to help on this task if there was a 
> > declared interest.
>
> Wearing my co-chair hat, the reason I didn't give backing is that I 
> didn't hear much desire for it. That is not to say you shouldn't do 
> it, just that it was not needed to be a WG work item.
>
> It is quite common in the IETF that there are set of WG work items 
> *and* individually-submitted drafts that extend, explain, or otherwise 
> refer to the WG work items. If you wanted to create a draft that would 
> eventually become an Informational RFC that explained how the Atom 
> format as we are discussing it relates to RDF, I'm sure that would be 
> useful to some people (and possibly many more than we can imagine 
> right now).
>
> So, instead of me saying "feel free to do it", let me encourage you to 
> do it. It doesn't affect the WG products or timelines, but could have 
> a positive effect of eventual Atom use.
>
> --Paul Hoffman, Director
> --Internet Mail Consortium