Tim Bray sent a message to the Atom Working group mailing list today declaring that, other than changes to the last draft that consensus has already been reached on, the Atom format is, for all practical purposes, done. There are a few more steps to be completed before it's official, as Tim notes:

"Note that this is a pronouncement, not a "call for further debate". Here are the next steps:

"1. Editors take the assembled changes and produce a format-09 I-D. Sooner is better.
"2. They post the I-D.
"3. Paul sends Scott a message, cc'ing the WG, that we're done.
"4. At this point there may be objections from the WG. We decide whether to accept the objections and pull the draft back, or tell the objectors they'll have to pursue the appeal process.
"5. The IESG process takes over at this point and we'll eventually hear back from them."

The quarks and gluons are joining together, forming protons, neutrons and electrons. Soon those will come together, and we'll have Atoms! What a relief!

By the way, we resolved two of my prior concerns:

1. Neither feeds nor entries can have more than one author
2. Multiple atom:entries with the same atom:id in the same feed document MUST be considered the same entry

...so I'm left with the following list of gripes:

1. No "Aggregation" document type
2. Ambiguous state of top level child of atom:content when the content is an XML type other than XHTML
3. No ability to define a Person construct once and refer to it from multiple places within the document
4. Entries don't have an "image" element
5. The definition of the atom:link element is too open ended
6. No reliable identifier is required for a feed