[uf-discuss] What to do when a microformat doesn't quite fit?

[Angus McIntyre]

>> What's the best course of action in cases like these? My use-case
>> doesn't exactly fit hAtom because it doesn't meet the mandatory
>> 'author' and 'content' requirements.
>
> I was under the impression that most of these sorts of requirements
> are carried over from Atom itself, not things that hAtom invented.
> For example, the requirements on author as specified in RFC 4287:
>
> atom:feed elements MUST contain one or more atom:author elements,
>       unless all of the atom:feed element's child atom:entry elements
>       contain at least one atom:author element.
>
> Thus, I suggest you use whatever solution you came up with for
> generating the actual Atom feeds.  Your Atom feeds are valid Atom 1.0,
> aren't they?  :-p

Ahem ... cough ... well, yes, actually. Give or take a few non-UTF8
characters that keep creeping in. For the Atom feeds, I seem to have got
around the author requirement by using the feed owner as the author of the
whole feed. I guess I just have to use that solution and decide where I
want to put the author on my pages. For aesthetic reasons, I'd rather not
have the author shown on those pages but I think it's counter to the
spirit of microformats to write the author block and then hide it using
CSS (rendering it machine-readable but human-invisible) so I may just have
to bite that particular bullet in the name of compliance.

With regard to my other questions, it appears to me that there is a slight
disconnect in the mapping between Atom and hAtom, i.e.

1. Atom's atomEntry has atomSource, but hAtom's hentry doesn't appear to
have a corresponding 'entry-source' or equivalent.

2. The schema description at
<http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom#Entry_Content> states that
'entry-content' is 'required', but a little later on it merely says that
"an Entry SHOULD have Entry Content". The Atom spec itself seems to be
silent on whether 'atomContent' is required or desirable.

There may be other discontinuities, but these are the ones that I've
noticed so far.

Angus

-- 
Home: http://www.raingod.com/angus/     Blog: http://www.disoriented.net/