[uf-discuss] hAtom draft

[David Janes]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Benjamin Carlyle" <benjamincarlyle at optusnet.com.au>
To: "Microformats Discuss" <microformats-discuss at microformats.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2005 10:44 AM
Subject: Re: [uf-discuss] hAtom draft


> David,
>
> On Wed, 2005-11-23 at 04:02 -0500, David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote:
>> Have at it:
>> http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom
>
> I'm currently doing some work based on Luke Arno's hAtom2Atom.xsl to get
> my feed reader of choice (liferea) to parse hAtom sites. I currently
> have the xsl scraping the html page for each entry in order to fill out
> author details when they are not present in the entry itself. I first
> search the entry proximity, then start back at xpath "/" if none are
> found. This is in line with the Entry Author heading in the
> microformat[1] which states:
> "if an Entry has 0 Entry Athor elements, the "logical Entry Author" is
> assumed to be the author of the XHTML page"
>
> Looking at the required feed[2] and entry[3] elements from
> atomenabled.org it seems that only "id", "title", and "updated" are
> required in each.

Right.

> Is this a mismatch with the standard, or is my
> understanding of the hAtom spec mismatched?

The Atom spec layers further requirements in the text, specifically from the 
Recommended Elements [4]

"Names one author of the entry. An entry may have multiple authors. An entry 
must contain at least one author element unless there is an author element 
in the enclosing feed, or there is an author element in the enclosed source 
element."

> Reading the information from
> that atomenabled.org I'm inclined to write the parser as only placing
> author and contributor elements in an entry when they appear in the
> hAtom html within an entry. If author and contributor fields were only
> to be found at the feed level I would only repeat them there in the atom
> output. Is my inclination reasonable? That would make any atom feed
> reader responsible for making the association between a feed with a
> particular author an each entry having a particular author rather than
> the transform...

I'm going to consider this a little further over Christmas. Right now, the 
hAtom spec does not define author (or contributor) at the feed level. This 
is an ommission, but I was concerned with making the minimal set of rules I 
could make.

Here's what I was/am thinking:
- the page also represents feed data; this is the reality of most blogs and 
there's a nice parsimony in not duplicating the information
- have you seen a blog where the Author is specified outside the entries 
(and not in the entries)? I.e. are we inventing edge cases that don't really 
exist?

That's not to say that what you're suggesting isn't a bad idea: that 
author/contributor are brought in IF they appear within the feed.

Regards, etc...
David

> -- 
> Benjamin Carlyle <benjamincarlyle at optusnet.com.au>
> [1] http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom#Entry_Author
> [2] http://atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/#requiredFeedElements
> [3] http://atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/#requiredEntryElements
>

[4] http://atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/#recommendedEntryElements