RE: atom:category excludes atom:* children?

["Brian Smith" <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bill de hOra wrote:
> Brian Smith wrote:
> That's not what the spec says.  What spec text allows a 
> client to assume a term is globally unique?

The spec says:

   The "scheme" attribute [...] identifies a categorization scheme. 

We seem to all be unanimous that here "identifies" means "uniquely identifies". But, immediately prior to that we have:

   The "term" attribute [...] identifies the category to
   which the entry or feed belongs. 

Here, apparently, "identifies" does not mean "uniquely identifies" even though the sentence structure is exactly the same.

I dug around and saw that in draft 04 of the spec., the term attribute was defined with different language:

   The "term" attribute [...] identifies the category
   within the categorization scheme to which the entry
   or feed belongs.

It is poorly worded but I think it is clearer than what the spec. says now.

I can see that there is consensus here (that I am wrong :), so I won't argue further about what the spec. says vs. what it intends to say. If there is some errata mechanism for the specification, we should consider adding a clarification there.

See also:
http://www.mail-archive.com/atom-syntax@xxxxxxxxxxxx/msg06874.html
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-atompub-format-04#section-3.7.1

Regards,
Brian