Re: atom:category excludes atom:* children?

[Antone Roundy <antone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Brian Smith wrote:
> I agree that @scheme seems pretty useless as it is defined in the
> specification. Luckily, if you avoid using @scheme, and you use IRIs
> for @term, you can avoid worrying about it.

Just to be sure we're clear, I DON'T think that it's useless -- I agree 
only that if the spec meant what you're saying it means, @scheme would 
be worthless.

But I think you're reading a different meaning into it than we intended 
when we created it.  Which is more likely:

1) Everybody working on the spec completely missed the fact that @scheme 
was useless and the fact that the definition of @term said nothing about 
how it should be sufficient by itself to uniquely identify a category, 
and should be constructed in a way that prevented collisions (even 
though we put a lot of effort into working out how atom:id would act as 
a unique identifier for a feed or entry).  And it didn't occur to anyone 
that since we wanted a globally unique identifier for a category, we 
could use atom:id instead of @term.

2) @term was intended to identify a category within a defined scheme 
which was indicated by @scheme, or within an ad hoc scheme when @scheme 
was absent.

Especially since I believe I remember the discussion running along the 
lines of #2, I find #1 highly implausible.

Antone