[uf-discuss] hAtom

[David Janes -- BlogMatrix]

Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:

> I have a semi-philosophical question: is the goal merely to  transcribe 
> atom, or really to provide a generic container format that  happens to 
> be atom-compatible?
> 
> When looking at your hatom proposal, it seem eerily similar to S5:
> 
> http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/xoxo-structure-ref.html
> 
> atomentry <-> slide
> content <-> slidecontent
> summary <-> handout
> 
> I'm all for NOT boiling the ocean, but these really seem like the  same 
> cup of tea.
> 
> The only concrete suggestion is simply to drop "atom" from the names,  
> so we can reuse it more generically.
> 
> Does that seem plausible?

META POINT: please add your questions to the Wiki [1] so *I don't have 
to*. This is taking me tens of hours to do and every timesaver helps!

As a set of goals for hAtom, off the top of my head

(1) to provide a blog-post microformat, based on how people actually 
produce weblogs
(2) based on (1), use Atom as it provides the most suitable data model 
for doing so
(3) based on (2), to make the format useful anywhere Atom might be used 
in context to create a syndication feed

And my anti-goal:

(1) _not_ to tell people how to write blogs or what there blog should 
look like; hAtom marked up blogs should look and behave _identically_ to 
what they before hAtom was applied

The reason "atom" is used as prefix in certain contexts is covered in [1].

Everything that has

(a) a title
(b) a link
(c) content

is going to look similar ... sometimes eerily so! This does not mean 
they're really related. I have mentioned this several times over the 
last several weeks, but read [2] _carefully_ to understand why a generic 
concept of "content" will _not_ work for marking up blog content

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom-issues
[2] http://microformats.org/wiki/blog-post-brainstorming#Entry_Content