hatom-issues

hAtom issues

marking up comments

• open issue! 2007-11-25 raised by Ken Wronkiewicz.
  1. There's no currently defined way to exactly handle threaded discussions. I think this is quite useful to have.
     • The prior art is RFC 4864. The microformat solution should map fairly cleanly to this.

atom:category scheme

• open issue! 2007-06-01 raised by Ryan King.
  1. rel-tag tagspaces should map to atom:category schemes
     • hAtom already defines how to map term and label. It seems that the tagspace can easily map to scheme

Geo

• open issue! 2006-02-03 raised by BrianSuda
  • We can use the geo microformat in hatom to represent GeoRSS element

Relationship of rel-bookmark to url+uid

The concept of permalink is available in hCard and hCalendar as the classes url and uid. This combination matches the permalink semantics by indicating that the url should be derefenced to find a more dynamic or up-to-date version of the content, and that that url is a stable unique id that can be used to identify the content.

hAtom 0.1 uses rel-bookmark for the permalink concept. The current state of uid-brainstorming indicates that the hCard and hCalendar permalink concept is likely to be used in subsequent microformats. It may be important to reconcile hAtom with that trajectory. Possible reconcilliations include:

1) To leave things as they are. The two permalink concepts are to be kept separate.

2) Treat the two concepts as equivalent. Allow both in hAtom, and consider allowing both in other formats. eg <a rel="bookmark" href="http://example.com/"> would fill out uid and url values if they are not supplied explicitly.

3) Choose one over the other for hAtom and perhaps for future microformats also. "url uid" allows for some greater freedom (uid can be pointed at a non-url uid), but it is unclear at this stage whether that freedom is warranted or advisable to permit.

Datetime format (atom:updated and atom:published)

• 2006-05-23 raised by Robert Bachmann
  • Atom requires the use RFC3339 datetimes, while hAtom 0.1 does not specify which datetime formats may be used.
    • ACCEPTED FAQ - hAtom references datetime-design-pattern, which discusses which date format to use

Feed id (atom:id)

• open issue! 2006-04-01 raised by Robert Bachmann
  1. atom:id is required for atom:feed. Thus it should be available in hAtom to.

It is suggested the Feed permalink should be used as the feed ID, however a piece by Mark Pilgrim (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/28/howto-atom-id) makes arguments against using permalinks and in favour of Tag URIs.

Feed permalink (atom:permalink)

• open issue! 2006-04-01 raised by Robert Bachmann
  • I'm proposing the following rules:
    1. a Feed Permalink element is identified by rel-bookmark at the feed level (inside a Feed element but not inside an Entry element)
    2. a Feed SHOULDMAY have a Feed Permalink
    3. a Feed Permalink element represents the concept of an Atom link in a feed.
    4. if the Feed Permalink is missing, use the URI of the page; if the Feed has an "id" attribute, add that as a fragment to the page URI
  • 2006-04-03 ChrisCasciano - I'm not sure that having a rel-boomkark-able link element at the feed level / to designate a feed in an html page separate for the other content is anything close to normal usage on the web, so I'd be very hesitant on suggesting this element "SHOULD" exist. I'm also curious when this element would link to anything but the current page (or some element on the current page) for this to be useful in the context of the HTML doc. I think taking the "id" on the feed is a more workable solution in most cases.
  • 2006-04-03 Robert Bachmann: I've replaced "SHOULD" with "MAY".
  • 2006-04-24 Robert Bachmann: Maybe we could simplify my proposal to:
    • "Use the URI of the page; if the Feed has an "id" attribute, add that as a fragment to the page URI"
    • IMO this would be good enough for at least 80% of the cases.
  • 2006-04-12 User:DavidJanes: can we find an example of this in the wild and if so we should add it to the -examples page.
  • singpolyma 00:05, 13 Apr 2006 (PDT) : since the link is going to be pointing to the home page for the item wouldn't rel-home make more sense? That's what I'm using in the XOXO Blog Format and my reasoning was that if hAtom ever defined this rel=home made the most sense for what you would add, because the feed's link is not to a part of the site by to the home of the site.

Feed updated (atom:updated)

• open issue! 2006-04-01 raised by Robert Bachmann
  • atom:updated is required for atom:feed. Thus it should be available in hAtom to. I'm proposing the following rules:
    1. The Feed Updated element is identified by the class name updated at the feed level (inside a Feed element but not inside an Entry element)
    2. If no element with the class name updated is present, use the youngest updated from the feed's entries.
  • 2006-04-12 User:DavidJanes I like this. And the definition of "feed level"
  • 2007-06-20 User:MikeKaply The "youngest" thing is a really bad idea. If a page has 100 hAtom entries, a parser would have to go through all 100 looking for a low date. That's crazy.
    • 2008-03-20 User:TobyInk Not crazy at all. I've just implemented an hAtom to Atom converter and I do precisely this. Most (useful) hAtom parsers will "go through all 100 entries" anyway, won't they? So why not look for the youngest updated date as part of that loop. The only slight annoyance is that in RFC 4287, the <atom:updated> element must occur before the first <atom:entry> element -- this is easily solved by inserting a placeholder <atom:updated> element, looping through the entries and then going back and filling in the date. This is really, really, not a difficult thing to implement.

Feed title (atom:title)

• open issue! 2006-04-01 raised by Robert Bachmann
  • atom:title is required for atom:feed. Thus it should be available in hAtom to. I'm proposing the following rules:
    1. a Feed Title element is identified by the class name entryfeed-title
    2. a Feed SHOULD have an Feed Title
    3. a Feed Title element represents the concept of an Atom feed title
    4. if the Feed Title is missing, use
       • the first <h#> element in the Feed, or
       • the <title> of the page, or
       • assume it is the empty string
  • 2006-04-01 ChrisCasciano - I think that the fall back to using the first h# on the page is dangerous.. depending on the pge it may be something that changes often (first h# is a post title) or is otherwise ambiguous. I would think using <title> before h# would be prefered if not the most common desire of the page author.
  • 2006-04-05 Robert Bachmann: Okay. Deleted "the first <h#> element in the Feed, or"
  • 2006-04-12 User:DavidJanes Note also in support of this decision that many blogs use <h#> to encode the date for a group of postings
  • 2006-04-12 User:DavidJanes: why entry-title for the feed title. Why not fn or feed-title?
  • 2006-04-12 Robert Bachmann: Sorry, this was a "copy & paste" mistake. Fixed now.
  • 2007-02-26 Mike Kaply: I think a feed title should be mandatory if an hfeed is present. If you have multiple feeds on a page, there is no way in a user interface to distinguish between different feeds.

Feed author and Entry author (atom:author)

• open issue! 2006-04-01 raised by Robert Bachmann
  • I'm proposing the following rules for Feed author:
    1. a Feed Author element is represented by class name author at the feed level (inside a Feed element but not inside an Entry element)
    2. a Feed Author element represents the concept of a Atom author
    3. a Feed Author element MUST be encoded in a hCard
    4. a Feed Author element SHOULD be encoded in a <address> element
    5. a Feed MAY have more than one Feed Author elements
    6. if the Feed Author is missing
       • find the Nearest In Parent <address> element(s) with class name author and that is/are a valid hCard
       • otherwise the Feed is invalid hAtom there is no Feed Author
  • I'm proposing the following rules for entry author:
    1. an Entry Author element is represented by class name author
    2. an Entry Author element represents the concept of an Atom author
    3. an Entry Author element MUST be encoded in an hCard
    4. an Entry Author element SHOULD be encoded in an <address> element
    5. If a Feed has no Feed author each Entry MUST have at least one Entry Author element
    6. If an Entry is enclosed by a Feed and this Feed has no Feed author, each Entry MUST have at least one Entry Author element. If an Entry is not enclosed by a Feed and has no Entry Author:
       • find the Nearest In Parent <address> element(s) with class name author and that is/are a valid hCard
       • otherwise the Entry is invalid hAtom
    7. an Entry MAY have more than one Entry Author elements
  • singpolyma 00:11, 13 Apr 2006 (PDT) : feed should not be invalid hAtom if feed-level has no author -- it should be invalid if feed-level has no author AND one or more entries have no author. Also, one or more entries may be missing an author IF feed-level has an author.
  • 2006-04-17 Robert Bachmann: I replaced "the Feed is invalid hAtom" with "there is no Feed Author"

Entry id (atom:id)

• open issue!2006-04-01 raised by Robert Bachmann
  • atom:id is required for atom:entry. Thus it should be available in hAtom to. The Entry permalink should be used as the entry id.
  • --Federico 19:52, 25 Apr 2006 (PDT): I would add "Only if the id attribute is not defined for the element that contains the entry". The id attribute can be a tag uri. If you use always use the Entry permalink as the entry id and the Atom feed uses tag uris, you would end with two different ids for the same entry.
  • 2006-12-31 response by Emanla Eraton No, it shouldn't be a permalink. It should be a "tag:" id for entries.
  • 2007-06-06 RyanKing - the syntax of tag URIs and html id attributes are incompatible. HTML disallows forward-slash (/) in ids [1], while tag URIs require them [2].

Author

author as an hcard is too much to require

The following 3 items were extracted from the conversation starting on irc with logs available starting around here

• Fil If, for example, you are programming an "aggregator" of news syndicated from many sources like in Sedna, chances are that you don't control what "authors" look like; they can be nicely microformated (if coming from an mf-enabled system), but most probably they will be internally represented by a string that contains, in some random order, a name, and/or an email, and so on. If you want to pass on this information in an hAtom feed, you can't possibly reformat it to an hCard. But you still want to pass it on in a <div class="author"> element.
  • Tantek I don't believe the "can't possibly" statement. Please provide a URL to a concrete example that you think you can't possibly reformat into an hCard so we can all take a look.
  • ChrisCasciano details of Fil's extraction in irc logs including sting data passed to his app in the form of "Béatrice XXXXXXX beatrice.xxxxxx@@zzzzzzzzz.com"
  • Fil the example url was given up there (Sedna); note that the author information comes from syndication links; nobody is going to edit them to outline what is the name, what is the email and so on, as everything is flowing through automatically... so here the "author" data is dirty, and will not be cleaned into an hCard. We can force it to be in an hCard but it will be meaningless if the source (original data) wasn't built on an mf-enabled software.

• pnhChris i don't disagree.. the field often comes from places too dumb to follow these rules well; even cases like wordpress that allow users to present their name 1 of 6 or 8 difference ways (from username to LF, FN) .. its not just writing a template to output as hatom at that point... you have to go further upstream where the string to be displayed is chosen .. I also think its pointless to have 10 vcards on the same page whose only data is a generic name like "Chris"
  • Tantek 10 vcards that are the same is pointless yes, but identifying who the author of 10 posts are is not pointless - that's the difference.
  • ChrisCasciano Agreed, but I still have concerns that "author" in hAtom does not always make for good hCards, though the situations where it does is optimal. My comments in the conversation were old comments I've made before over concerns and hardships or the lack of desire to make crappy data more portable, in neither of these cases do I think my two comments alone provide reasons to make change from the hAtom 0.1 spec
    • Frances - Just thought I'd mention a scenario I have where the author of an entry does make a pretty useless vCard - the author in each case is an entire team ("creative team", "technical department") etc., rather than a specific, identifiable, person. Some use may be regained when URL to specific team/information is included, in this circumstance.
• Fil for the moment, to comply losely with hAtom 0.1, I will use <span class="author"><span class="vcard"><span class="fn">My Name</span></span></span> ; but it's not good
  • Tantek You can actually simplify that (one fewer span) with: <span class="author vcard"><span class="fn">My Name</span></span>

Other Questions and Issues

General comments, modeling issues, algorithm issues, should have issues, etc. go here.

Entry Updated Required? -- Blogger Issue

moved to hatom-brainstorming

'MAY have multiple Feed elements' -- details and viability of multiple feeds

moved to hatom-brainstorming

pre 0.1 issues

This section is more or less closed, as hAtom 0.1 is out the door. If there are open issues that you are championing that didn't make it into hAtom 0.1, move them up above to the hAtom 0.2 section

See: hatom-issues-pre-0.1

Template

Consider using this format (copy and paste this to the end of the list to add your issues; replace ~~~ with an external link if preferred) to report issues or feedback, so that issues can show up in hAtom subscriptions of this issues page. If open issues lack this markup, please add it.

Please post one issue per entry, to make them easier to manage. Avoid combining multiple issues into single reports, as this can confuse or muddle feedback, and puts a burden of separating the discrete issues onto someone else who 1. may not have the time, and 2. may not understand the issue in the same way as the original reporter.

<div class="hentry">
{{OpenIssue}} 
<span class="entry-summary author vcard">
 <span class="published">2011-MM-DD</span> 
 raised by <span class="fn">~~~</span>
</span>
<div class="entry-content discussion issues">
* <strong class="entry-title">«Short title of issue»</strong>. «Description of Issue»
** Follow-up comment #1
** Follow-up comment #2
</div>
</div>

See Also

• hAtom - the draft proposal
• hatom-faq - knowledge base
• blog-post-brainstorming
• blog-post-formats
• blog-post-examples
• blog-description-format - how to describe a blog (as opposed to the individual entries, which is what we're doing here)
• mfo-examples
• naming-principles