One thing that didn't catch my fancy in the Atom spec was the number of required elements for an Atom feed. For example, each entry (like an RSS item) in an Atom feed must contain both a "modified" date/time and an "issued" date/time. It may also contain a "created" date/time. If there is no "created", it is assumed to be the same as "modified". My biggest qualm with all of this is that "issued" can't be omitted and default to the value of the required date/time element. Perhaps my opinion on this subject will change once they've explained the purpose of the "issued" element (or once I find the place where it's explained). But I haven't been able to think of what it could be used for that might not often be the same as the time where the entry was created.
My second qualm is that the required element is "modified", not "created". It just seems more logical to me to talk about when an entry was created first, and not be required to talk about when it was modified until it has been modified.
More required elements which I don't understand the need for requiring are listed below. Before I list them, let me say that, first, this is version 0.3 of the spec--who knows what will change before it's considered "1.0". Second, I can understand the desire to encourage feed publishers to put enough information into a feed that readers will be able to know a certain baseline amount about the feed. It just seems to me that some elements should be marked "SHOULD" be included rather than "MUST" be included. So, the list--first, for the feed: author. For entries: link (yeah, just about every feed will have links, but can't you conceive of a feed that just contains info without the need to link to anything else? If someone wants to publish just an Atom feed and not have a website, they may not have anywhere to link to), author (unless the author is the same as of the feed).
Okay, so now that I scan the spec again, there are only four required elements I'd make optional. So while not as light as hydrogen, Atom isn't as heavy as uranium either. It will be interesting to watch Atom evolve.
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January 24th, 2006 at 7:10 pm
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