[uf-discuss] hAtom draft - class="title"

[Kevin Marks]

On Dec 27, 2005, at 3:43 PM, Tantek Çelik wrote:
> This means working deliberately to avoid the two cardinal sins that
> namespaces typical both enable and encourage:
>
> 1. The same term is used to mean two different things
> 2. Two terms are used to mean the same things

Indeed. In fact this is one of the advantages of Atom over RSS - 
resolving ambiguous usage.

In RSS 'description' is used for both summary and full-content feeds.

Atom defines distinct 'summary' and 'content' elements for this

In RSS 'link' is used for both 'entry permalink' and 'external linked 
element from a brief entry'.

>
> The current "established" microformats have avoided this problem by
> essentially reusing from earlier microformats when possible, *before*
> reusing from other standards.
>
> E.g. hReview has reused a lot from hCard and hCalendar.
>
> See http://microformats.org/wiki/existing-classes for an overview.
>
> In the case of 'title', Paul is right.  hCard (by way of vCard) has 
> defined
> 'title' to mean something in particular.
>
> In the case of hReview, we used 'summary' from hCalendar to serve this
> purpose.
>
> Would it be possible to do so for hAtom as well?

I would say that letting hCard use a bare 'title' to mean 'honorific 
form of address' was possibly a mistake in retrospect, but it is 
established.

That said, 'title' is context-defined in Atom - it can mean 'feed 
title' or 'entry title'.

Replacing this with 'summary' would be a mistake, as that needlessly 
blurs the summary/content distinction which is important for authors, 
readers and parsers alike.

I think keeping 'summary' and 'content' are good. hReview's and 
hCalendar's 'summary' is IMO not really a title in the atom/rss sense, 
but a one-line abbreviated form.

So I would suggest 'entry-title'.