Subject: Re: author tag

From: Asbjørn Ulsberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 20:54:18 +0200

On Mon, 28 Jun 2004 19:14:07 +0100, Bill de hÓra <[email-masked]> wrote:

>> The current draft is missing some explanation on  the author  
>> inheritance from atom:feed to atom:entry,
>
> Perhaps that because it's complicated ;)

I agree it's complicated. Maybe PacePersonRef[1] is a simpler solution? I  
think I remember discussing this a year ago or something, but have no idea  
of what came out of that discussion. When I look at it now, I think it's  
probably simpler than the value-inheritance from feed to entry.

Inherited values works fine if the construct is implicitly or explicitly  
required. Now that we've discovered that Atom probably should be possible  
to use anonymously, author can't be required anymore. That causes trouble  
with the inheritance, since the inherited value from feed must be  
overriden to a blank one if the entry is posted anonymously.

> Why not just markup the information explicitly? The less of a processing  
> model we require around the Atom format the more useful it will be

Of course, but duplicating <author> (and possibly other Author Construct)  
elements in a feed with 100 entries is not very cool. I think  
PacePersonRef might be a feasible solution to having optional authors.  
Maybe we could even add an @href and @type attribute on the <author>  
element and have it link to a FOAF file somewhere.

>> Should we at least require someone to  take authorship and
>> responsibility for the feed?
>
> There's perhaps no need. At a web arch level it's implied by the feed  
> URIs.

I don't think an URI implies authorship. The feed might be syntethic, and  
all sorts of other things. This _might_ be fixed by <origin>, but there's  
a lot of other issues I can't think of right now that we need to cover.

____
[1] <url: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/PacePersonRef>

-- 
Asbjørn Ulsberg         -=|=-        [email-masked]
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»

---

From: Bill de hÓra <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 21:03:53 +0100

Asbjørn Ulsberg wrote:

>> Why not just markup the information explicitly? The less of a 
>> processing  model we require around the Atom format the more useful it 
>> will be
> 
> Of course, but duplicating <author> (and possibly other Author 
> Construct)  elements in a feed with 100 entries is not very cool. 

Glibly, if I was worried about this I wouldn't be using XML to begin 
with ;)

It does have the twin benefits of being precise and unambiguous.

Perhaps there is an inheritence processing model that is 
unambiguous, consistent and loseless for this and one that will also 
work with synthetic feeds, multiple authors, ip addresses and so on. 
We would then want to ensure only one such mechanism is used for the 
format. In other words -1 to ad-hoc inheritence mechanisms. But 
there is precedent that indicates that this kind of inheritence, as 
means of saving keystrokes or bits, has not always served us as an 
discipline well.

> I don't think an URI implies authorship. The feed might be syntethic, 
> and  all sorts of other things. 

Yes, my bad.

cheers
Bill