lalitapas elchichid
This page is for documenting Q&A about hAtom.
If you have a new question to ask, Please consider first asking your question on the microformats-discuss list.
Please do not use "?" or other punctuation in the headers - it helps to keep the URLs to their fragment identifiers shorter and easier to read, copy/paste etc.
No, hAtom is not intended to replace RSS or Atom. While most weblogs and other websites do provide their latest articles in a structured fashion (via RSS and/or Atom feeds), most of them do not provide their older articles in a structured way. This is one of the problems that hAtom can solve.
My client does not want to display their name after every post, but would like this to be valid. Can I hide the author info in an abbr tag or something?
In the case of single author: If a page is authored by only one author ever, then implied "address" as author can be used whereby in the absense of a valid hCard example within the hAtom being found, the parser will use the hCard information in the <address> element and hCard of the page (See final clause of hAtom address author field http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom#Entry_Author). This negates the need to specify an author in each entry.
Answer required for multiple authors?
You can read through the archives for the reasoning in depth, but in summary: since we were reusing the semantics of the IETF Atom standard, we very much wanted to reuse the vocabulary as well to minimize confusion and mean precisely the same semantics as defined in the Atom RFC 4287, and thus a few of the hAtom properties appear to be prefixed (entry-title, entry-content, entry-summary) in order to literally reuse those terms from the RFC (title, content, summary).