Subject: The Atomic age

From: Tim Bray <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 23:37:05 -0700

Paul assures me that the remaining IETF process steps will not  
introduce material technical changes, and so format-10 is appropriate  
as a basis for implementors to go to work.  So, implementors... to  
work.  And everyone, now is a good time to tell the world.  -Tim

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From: Anne van Kesteren <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 10:32:29 +0200

> work.  And everyone, now is a good time to tell the world.  -Tim

Yay!

(Except for the namespace that is. Ouch!)

-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>

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From: Asbjørn Ulsberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 14:04:53 +0200

> Yay!

I second this yay. Yay!

> (Except for the namespace that is. Ouch!)

Yea, that was a bit awkward. The format has a couple of other minor flaws  
as well, but nothing worth fighting for and nothing serious at all. This  
is a good specification, all in all.

-- 
Asbjørn Ulsberg
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»

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From: Robert Sayre <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 08:17:58 -0400

On 7/15/05, Asbjørn Ulsberg <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Yea, that was a bit awkward. 

http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom/BiKeShEd?

(yay!)

Robert Sayre

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From: Walter Underwood <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 08:56:10 -0700

--On July 14, 2005 11:37:05 PM -0700 Tim Bray <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> So, implementors... to  work.

Do we have a list of who is implementing it? That could be used in
the "Deployment" section of <http://www.tbray.org/atom/RSS-and-Atom>.

Ultraseek will implement Atom. We need to think more about exactly
what it means for a search engine to implement it, but we'll at
least spider it.

wunder

"Creature with the Atom Brain, why is he acting so strange?"
  Roky Erickson
--
Walter Underwood
Principal Architect, Verity

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From: Tim Bray <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 09:09:47 -0700

> the "Deployment" section of <http://www.tbray.org/atom/RSS-and-Atom>.

Good idea.

> what it means for a search engine to implement it, but we'll at

Want to write a few words in web-space somewhere, Walter, and we can  
put that in the Wiki? -Tim

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From: James M Snell <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 09:39:41 -0700

Congrats All!

I'll be updating my personal blog feed to Atom 1.0 shortly.  I've 
already updated my IBM internal blog feed to Atom 1.0.  Took less than 
five minutes to update from 0.3 to 1.0.

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From: Henry Story <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 20:06:40 +0200

It would be easy to add atom to BlogEd, though I really would like the

    <link  rel="&ext;next" href="http://bblfish.net/blog/archive. 
10.atom">

to be agreed upon. This would allow me to place all the blog content  
in an
archive. It would of course also be useful to have the namespace.

Henry

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From: Henry Story <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 21:12:59 +0200

Sorry. It looks like there is a final namespace:

http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom

Is that correct?

Henry

On 15 Jul 2005, at 20:06, Henry Story wrote:
> to be agreed upon. This would allow me to place all the blog  
> content in an

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From: Robert Sayre <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 15:21:23 -0400

Absolutely.

Robert Sayre

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From: Graham <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 20:28:48 +0100

> the "Deployment" section of <http://www.tbray.org/atom/RSS-and-Atom>.

My blog has one here:
http://www.fondantfancies.com/blog/atom1/

I think it's valid, though it's hard to tell without a validator or  
even a parser. I'm currently rewriting the engine of Shrook to be  
compatible too.

(You may also notice I'm doing my little bit to make sure atom:id is  
implemented properly)

Graham Parks

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From: Robert Sayre <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 15:35:38 -0400

http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fondantfancies.com%2Fblog%2Fatom1%2F

:)

Robert Sayre

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From: Tim Bray <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 13:00:02 -0700

On Jul 15, 2005, at 12:35 PM, Robert Sayre wrote:

>
> http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F% 
> 2Fwww.fondantfancies.com%2Fblog%2Fatom1%2F

Hmm... the feed looks OK to me; I wouldn't be surprised if it's  
tickling a bug in the just-barely-into-beta Atom 1.0 feedvalidator  
code. -Tim

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From: Dan Brickley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 21:05:34 +0100

>http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fondantfancies.com%2Fblog%2Fatom1%2F
Oh, is it upgraded to be a 1.0 validator? front page talks about 0.3 
still...

I've just downloaded Jing, been checking things that way using:

    java -jar jing-20030619/bin/jing.jar -c atom.rnc  a2.xml

Talking of which...

I was just now hesitating as to whether to post this, but here goes. I think
 there seems to be a non-empty class of XML documents which parse as
both RDF/XML and as Atom 1.0. This class may be (a) ugly (b) quirky
(c) a frustratingly small subset of Atom 1.0, but it ... seems to exist.

I've just check in this evening's experiments; thanks to Norm for some
Relax-NG handholding btw.

According to Jing and atom.rnc,

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/HTML/samples/atom/a1.xml

...seems to be acceptable as Atom. I took the tiny example from the spec,
added some RDF'y bits, and fed it to some validators.

According to the RDF Validator, it's also RDF/XML (we omit the top level
rdf:RDF, so RDF tools would need some other way, eg. media type, to get
a clue that it could be parsed into triples).

More notes at 
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/HTML/samples/atom/notes.html

Let me emphasise that I'm not claiming these Atom docs "are" reasonably
interpreted as RDF. Just that they seem to, by happy coincidence as it 
were, at least
share a syntax with RDF. The intepretation of this syntactic state of 
affairs is
up for discussion.

cheers,

Dan

ps. congrats everyone on getting Atom 1.0 out the door!

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From: Bjoern Hoehrmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 22:14:52 +0200

>http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/HTML/samples/atom/a1.xml

`Content-Type: text/xml; qs=0.9`. Hurray...
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:[email-masked] · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
68309 Mannheim · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

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From: Dan Brickley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 21:21:50 +0100

>`Content-Type: text/xml; qs=0.9`. Hurray...
I could fix that... question is, to what? :)

The Atom spec says Atom docs are identified using the Atom media type, but
I don't see anything like a 'SHOULD NOT' regarding serving them with 
other types.
In the mixed-format case of an instance being both valid RDF, and valid 
Atom, we
get into pragmatics. RDF tools wouldn't know it was RDF/XML since Atom 
doesn't
allow a toplevel rdf:RDF wrapper element as foreign markup. But Atom 
tools also
have a claim on the content type. Maybe it could be content-negotiable? 
Something
for everybody...?

Dan

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From: Sjoerd Visscher <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 23:24:28 +0200

> share a syntax with RDF. The intepretation of this syntactic state of 

I've never understood what makes hybrid RDF/other xml formats appealing. 
A simple xslt conversion turnes the xml format (the whole format, not a 
subset) in much better RDF, with no compromises.

-- 
Sjoerd Visscher
http://w3future.com/weblog/

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From: Dan Brickley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 22:33:01 +0100

Sjoerd Visscher wrote:

>> interpreted as RDF. Just that they seem to, by happy coincidence as 
>> it were, at least
> I've never understood what makes hybrid RDF/other xml formats 
> appealing. A simple xslt conversion turnes the xml format (the whole 
> format, not a subset) in much better RDF, with no compromises.
>
It might well be that the XSLT/GRDDL approach is best. It depends what 
you're
using Atom for. Lots of Atom constructs use an <abc def="...">ghi</abc> 
idiom, which
won't parse as RDF. For more "data-oriented" feeds (non-blog stuff, eg. 
job listings,
ecommerce, events, maps etc) much more of the payload will live in 
extensions anyhow, and
using minimal Atom (per my example) might mean the hybrid style finds a 
niche.

For the XSLT/GRDDL case, we'd still need to agree quite which triples to 
generate, eg. whether
to use the same namespace as 'normal' Atom, so there are some details to 
work out.

cheers,

Dan

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From: Antone Roundy <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 16:30:08 -0600

> the "Deployment" section of <http://www.tbray.org/atom/RSS-and-Atom>.
I've update Grouper (http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/grouper/) to support 
conversion of Atom 1.0 to RSS 2.0.  A future version will support going 
the other way...when I get time to complete the major overhaul that 
will be required to do that.

Antone

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2005 09:07:06 +0200

Hi,

<http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgreenbytes.de%2Ftech%2Fwebdav%2Fwebdav.atom>

reports a validation error (feed-level category element), where I think 
it shouldn't...

Best regards, Julian

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From: Henry Story <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2005 09:51:17 +0200

Is the mixed format case really possible? Last time I looked there  
were problems,
such as different tags using attributes with the same name but with  
different
semantics. I thought we were close last time I looked, but not quite  
there.

Henry

On 15 Jul 2005, at 22:21, Dan Brickley wrote:
> I don't see anything like a 'SHOULD NOT' regarding serving them  
> with other types.
> In the mixed-format case of an instance being both valid RDF, and  
> valid Atom, we
> get into pragmatics. RDF tools wouldn't know it was RDF/XML since  
> Atom doesn't
> allow a toplevel rdf:RDF wrapper element as foreign markup. But  
> Atom tools also
> have a claim on the content type. Maybe it could be content- 
> negotiable? Something
> for everybody...?
>
> Dan
>

---

From: Dan Brickley <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2005 09:01:32 +0100

> semantics. I thought we were close last time I looked, but not quite  
It seems feasible for a somewhat constrained subset, on first investigation.

Dan

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From: [email-masked] (Peter Robinson)
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 22:46:36 +0100

Tim Bray <[email-masked]> wrote:

> as a basis for implementors to go to work.

Excellent!

> So, implementors... to work.

Just to show willing:
<http://www.ticketswitch.com/cgi-bin/atom_feed.exe>

Peter