Re: Feed History -03

[Robert Sayre <sayrer@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 8/16/05, Henry Story <henry.story@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 16 Aug 2005, at 21:00, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> >
> > I very much disagree; relative references should be allowable in
> > simple extensions, and in fact the rationale that Tim gives is the
> > reasoning I assumed regarding Atom extensions; if I had known that
> > the division between simple and complex extensions would be used to
> > justify a constraint on the use of context in simple extensions, I
> > would have objected to it.
> 
> The problem is that readers of your xml that wish to store your data
> in some form other than xml (relational database, triple store,
> object oriented database, prolog database,...), and that may
> not at the time of consumption know about your extension will  save
> the content in text, which is all the spec says they should do. Since
> they don't at the time know the meaning of fh:prev and
> in particular that it should contain a URI  they can't save the
> absolute URI it represents.
> All they will be able to save is relative uri which will be
> meaningless if the context of the
> original document is lost.

The app should store the relative URI, and it shouldn't lose the context.

> 
> > If you're using something like RDF to model feeds, you already have
> > a number of context-related issues to work through, this isn't an
> > extra burden.
> 
> The point of making extensions is that they should be interpretable
> or at least in part useable
> by parties that don't understand the extension.

It still is.

> This is a question of the Atom spec saying that the content of a
> simple extension element is character data. Yet you are now wishing
> to put in relative references that have complex semantics
> not completely understandable without having the original context of
> the document they appear in.

Lots of extensions will be like this. What's one itunes extenstion
without the others? :)

In summary, I agree with Mark.

Robert Sayre