Namespaces, Early Implementations and Users

There's an interesting thread going on in the Atom community and  
which is a bit wider than Atom itself.

To make a long story short, Atom has been first developed in a group  
of individual and then under the process of IETF. During its  
development the initial draft had been released with a version number  
"Atom 0.3" and its own namespace.

[[[
This specification uses XML Namespaces [W3C.REC-xml-names-19990114]  
to uniquely identify XML elements and attribute names. It uses the  
following namespace prefixes for the indicated namespace URIs;

"atom":
     http://purl.org/atom/ns#
]]]

-- The Atom Syndication Format 0.3 (PRE-DRAFT)
http://www.mnot.net/drafts/draft-nottingham-atom- 
format-02.html#rfc.section.1.2
Mon, 05 Dec 2005 23:47:48 GMT

BUT  with a late note in the draft itself saying

[[[
This draft is made available for historical purposes only; DO NOT  
implement it or ship products conforming to it. This work has  
migrated to the ATOMPUB Working Group in the IETF; see RFC 4287.
]]]

-- The Atom Syndication Format 0.3 (PRE-DRAFT)
http://www.mnot.net/drafts/draft-nottingham-atom-format-02.html
Mon, 05 Dec 2005 23:47:48 GMT


All Weblog platforms implementers have implemented Atom 0.3 with the  
namespace from the draft and *deployed it*.

Now Atom Syndication Format (version 1.0) is out and has become a  
stable RFC.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt

[[[
1.2. Namespace and Version The XML Namespaces URI [W3C.REC-xml- 
names-19990114] for the XML data format described in this  
specification is: http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom For convenience, this  
data format may be referred to as "Atom 1.0". This specification uses  
"Atom" internally.
]]]

-- 
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt
Thu, 01 Dec 2005 03:21:58 GMT


So people who are trying to validate their previous feeds version  
atom 0.3 don't validate anymore.
	http://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/error/ObsoleteNamespace.html

So what's happening? A huge interoperability mess between the Content  
Providers and and the Aggregators

Some vendors have implemented for a long time Atom 0.3, deployed  
products, and don't want necessary to move to atom 1.0, because they  
don't see the benefits. Some others don't want to produce atom 1.0  
feed because it will break these products which have implemented atom  
0.3 draft specification.


1.  Early implementations and large user testing give benefits for  
the quality of products
2. At the same time it creates interoperability mess because it  
creates legacy contents and applications that new implementations  
have to deal with because in the end there are people using these.



* Some References.

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/04/ 
if_its_not_broken_dont_fix_it.html
http://photomatt.net/2006/03/19/invalid-atom
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx? 
guid=1d3eb374-1582-42df-9881-a00d3bd3fabb
http://www.franklinmint.fm/blog/archives/000701.html





-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager, QA Activity Lead
   QA Weblog - http://www.w3.org/QA/
      *** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Monday, 10 April 2006 03:15:46 UTC