RE: Atom Content Negotiation (follow-up)

[James Holderness <[e-mail]>]

> on
> http://dret.typepad.com/dretblog/2011/04/atom-content-negotiation.html i
> suggested a <link> usage that is not allowed by atom (because extension
> attributes need to be namespaced), but i think the problem is worth a
> solution and i'm planning to write a small draft for it.

I don't get why you rejected the "link content variants" solution. You don't necessarily have to include the HTML version inline - you could just have a very basic text summary.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">

  <title>Example Feed</title>
  <link href="http://example.org/"/>
  <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
  <author>
    <name>John Doe</name>
  </author>
  <id>urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b93C-0003939e0af6</id>
 
  <entry>
    <title>Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok</title>
    <link type="text/html" href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03.html"/>
    <link type="application/xml" href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03.xml"/>
    <link type="application/json" href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03.json"/>
    <link type="application/rdf+xml" href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03.rdf"/>
    <id>urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a</id>
    <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
    <summary>Some text.</summary>
  </entry>

</feed>

And even the summary isn't strictly necessary. You don't seem to be particularly interested in producing a feed that would be useful to a typical feed reader, so you might as well go with the bare minimum necessary to make the feed valid.

If you think it absolutely necessary to create a new rel type to make your system work, you should probably be asking yourself whether you really want Atom as your data format.

TLDR: I think your proposal sucks.