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

[John Panzer]

Angus McIntyre wrote:

>>>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.
>
>  
>
I think you're presenting the first use case for this in hAtom.

>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.
>  
>
For Atom, "content" is intended to be used for full content (the entire 
article, blog post, whatever) while "summary" is intended to be used for 
"a short summary, abstract, or excerpt of an entry".  The idea being 
that feed providers can be very explicit about what they're providing, 
and feed consumers can know what kind of thing they're dealing with.  
It's quite reasonable to have a feed of just summaries if that's what 
you want to publish (IMHO).

-John


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