[uf-discuss] Hatom or hcalendar?

[David Janes]

On 3/23/07, Jeremy Keith <jeremy at adactio.com> wrote:
> This is a really good question. My first thought was "Yeah, why
> *didn't* I use hAtom?" After all, there's nothing to stop me using
> both hCalendar and hAtom...
>
> So I started editing the template and I hit a snag: I don't have an
> author listed for each entry. Author is required for hAtom. Now, I
> could just put a single hCard somewhere within the hAtom feed and
> that would solve the problem:
>
>  From http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom:
> "If the Entry Author is missing, find the Nearest In Parent <address>
> element(s) with class name author and that is/are a valid hCard"
>
> But I'm not publishing an <address> already and isn't the whole idea
> of microformats that we don't change *what* we're publishing, just
> add more meaning to what we're already publishing?
>
> Of course, I can go ahead and add the hAtom classes anyway:
> http://lifestream.adactio.com/
>
> But that's not a valid hAtom feed.

My belief now is that hAtom 0.2 should provide a better set of
defaulting rules, especially for "author". It's crazy that hAtom
brings you 95% of the way to marking up microcontent and then lets
down what seems to be a fairly common use case. What this default
should be is a mystery, perhaps something like "page" or "anonymous"
with the "url" to be that of the page.

> I have to say that I find it a little weird that author is required
> but entry-title is not. Looking at the Atom spec, "title" is a
> required feed element and "author" is recommended. For hAtom, that's
> been inverted:
>
> http://atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/#requiredFeedElements

No, this [1] is what you want to be looking at.

Regards, etc...
David

[1] http://atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/#recommendedEntryElements

-- 
David Janes
Founder, BlogMatrix
http://www.blogmatrix.com
http://blogmatrix.blogmatrix.com