Subject: enclosures: usecases

From: Lucas Gonze <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 13:42:15 -0400 (EDT)

1) For Flickr, the user can download the image, not a chunk of HTML
    that references it.

2) You have a portable MP3 player, and you have a feed which gives you
    MP3s to copy onto it.

3) You have a bandwidth limited feed reader.  For example, over a
    mobile phone, where you are charged for bandwidth.

4) You have a portable hard drive which you use to carry source code,
    and you have a feed containing diffs.

5) For very large images like the NASA P.O.T.D, the download time is
    high enough to want to prefetch.

6) Whether the publisher wants to dictate how the image is displayed
    in relation to the item or whether they want the consumer to be
    able to configure that.  I find it useful to have them separated so
    that, for example, the feed can be displayed in a table with images
    in the first column and title/link and descriptions in the second.

7) Some consuming applications may strip out inline images from
    content.  Putting it into an enclosure MIGHT increase the
    probability of the application displaying it, since they more
    control over presentation (see the second sentence above for an
    example).

8) If the content is plain text, the image can't be included in it.

........................................

Next is to ask whether an enclosure element and/or the type attribute
is the best way to do these.  Is there a more parsimonious solution
using other Atom features, HTTP features, or layers higher in the
stack than the feed format?

- Lucas