Re: Atom vs Polyglot

On 2013-03-21 15:38, Noah Mendelsohn wrote:
>
> On 3/21/2013 9:51 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
>> Noah Mendelsohn <nrm@arcanedomain.com> wrote:
>>  > You could imagine, for example, the ATOM folks considering a formal
>>  > reference to polyglot had a polyglot spec been available at the time.
>>  > ...
>>
>> Actually, I don't see how this would have helped and what problem it
>> would
>> have solved (and yes, I've been involved in Atom).
>
> There's every chance I'm mistaken in this, in which case I apologize. My
> recollection of ATOM is that it is an RSS-like format that is required
> to be well formed XML. If that recollection is wrong, then my comment
> makes no sense.

No, that is correct.

> My understanding is that it's often useful to include in ATOM feeds
> fragments of HTML "snipped" from the blogs, etc. that are being
> summarized. My assumption was that there might be a need for the blogs
> themselves to be served text/html, but for the snippets in ATOM to be,
> essentially, XHTML fragments. One way (not the only way) to achieve this
> would be to restrict at least the "snippable" parts of the blog to
> polyglot.

Atom supports multiple content models; XHTML is propertly inlined 
(namespaced-XML etc), while HTML is transported as plain text 
(essentially escaped).

> In general, I think polyglot is potentially useful when content or
> fragments that are usually served as text/html need to be included in
> XHTML or other XML documents.

That is true, but the existence of a Polyglot spec wouldn't have changed 
the design of Atom. There was a big group of people who simply did not 
want to be bothered with generating well-formed XHTML, thus Atom had to 
support that mode as well.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Thursday, 21 March 2013 14:46:47 UTC