Abstract
Encourage interoperability and accessibility by suggesting that key textual constructs be both present and non-empty.
Note: this Pace is now a proper superset of the changes listed in PaceOptionalSummary
Status
Open
Rationale
There are existance proofs of tools that are less useful in the presence of entries without a title, or entries without either a summary or inline textual content. In fact, at least one such tool discards all such entries entirely. This fact, when viewed in isolation, would argue for making such elements mandatory.
Unfortunately, there are also existence proofs of title-only feeds, and entries for which there are no titles. Reluctantly, this leads one to conclude that while these use cases must be allowed, it would be irresponsible for the spec not to warn potential producers of such feeds that by not providing a textual fallback they may face interoperability issues.
Proposal
Make the following changes/addition to the draft-ietf-atompub-format-08 document.
section 3.1.1.1
Change:
-
If the value is "text", the content of the Text construct MUST NOT contain child elements.
To:
-
If the value is "text", the content of the Text construct MUST NOT contain child elements and SHOULD NOT be empty.
section 3.1.1.2
Change:
-
If the value of "type" is "html", the content of the Text construct MUST NOT contain child elements, and SHOULD be suitable for handling as HTML [HTML].
To:
-
If the value of "type" is "html", the content of the Text construct MUST NOT contain child elements, SHOULD NOT be empty, and SHOULD be suitable for handling as HTML [HTML].
section 3.1.1.3
Change:
-
The XHTML div MUST contain XHTML text and markup that could validly appear within an XHTML div element.
To:
-
The XHTML div SHOULD NOT be empty and MUST contain XHTML text and markup that could validly appear within an XHTML div element.
section 4.1.2
Delete:
-
In section 4.1.2 of format-08, there is a bullet point as follows: "atom:entry elements MUST contain an atom:summary element in any of the following cases:". Remove the first item in the sub-list, which reads "the atom:entry element contains no atom:content element.", leaving summary required in the cases where the content is remote or non-textual.
Add:
-
atom:entry elements which do not contain an atom:content element, or whose atom:content element's type attribute indicates a MIME media type, SHOULD contain an atom:summary element.
Impacts
As these requirements are only SHOULDs, no feeds which are currently valid will become invalid. However, those that follow these suggestions will find that their feeds are useful to a wider audience than they would be otherwise.
