Re: Namespace for atommedia

Danny,

As the original author of AtomMedia I can speak to my main motivation 
for using it rather than MediaRSS:

AtomMedia uses the hyperlink mechanism already built in to Atom, which 
has the immediate benefit of being compatible with generic Atom clients 
which know to hunt for link rel="enclosure" without having to duplicate 
that information in media:content.

It was originally penned at a time where there was less use of MediaRSS 
in Atom, when I felt that a more Atom-shaped extension might feel more 
at home in an Atom feed. By being simpler I hoped to encourage more 
consistency and thus simpler parsing compared to the various different 
ways MediaRSS provides of saying the same thing. It could be argued that 
since then adoption of MediaRSS as an Atom extension has increased to 
the point where consumers would now be required to support both, and so 
these points are moot.

To address Mark Nottingham's earlier point, media:description was added 
to match the media:description in MediaRSS. It is possible that in Atom 
land Atom's own "summary" element could serve that purpose.



Danny Ayers wrote:
> On 17 February 2010 23:24, Chris Messina <chris.messina@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Largely because MediaRSS is overspecified, no longer actively maintained,
>> and a bit crufty.
> 
> I don't wish to be too critical, getting thing to work is obviously
> the priority. But I'd like to find out why it was felt that
> reinvention was preferred over reuse.
> Overspecified shouldn't be a problem, nor cruftiness, maintenance is a
> good point.
> 
>> You can use MediaRSS with ActivityStreams if you want (it's just another
>> namespace) but we wanted to limit requiring support for all the additional
>> metadata that MediaRSS specifies.
> 
> It's maybe just me coming from an RDF-oriented place, but I don't see
> why you can't just cherry-pick the terms that are useful, ignore the
> rest.
> 
>> There is intentionally an overlap in terms — as AtomMedia should look
>> familiar to anyone who's worked with MediaRSS. In some ways, AtomMedia is
>> almost more like a pared down profile of MediaRSS, designed to work in Atom
>> feeds.
> 
> Tell me Chris, are there political reasons not to use (Yahoo!)
> MediaRSS - perfectly understandable if so, but technically I see no
> reason for not favouring reuse.
> 
> Again from the RDF world you can say <this:enclosure>
> <owl:sameClassAs> <that:enclosure> - but it does mean the writing of
> another query, another XSLT...
> 
> What would the Dalai Lama do?
> 
> Cheers,
> Danny.
> 
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 18 February 2010 17:04:46 UTC