[whatwg] Removing the need for separate feeds

Fri May 22 19:51:18 PDT 2009

On Fri, 22 May 2009 07:01:51 +0100, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

> It doesn't collect the blogroll or the blog post tags yet, mostly because
> I'm not sure how to do that. Any suggestions of improvements are  
> naturally welcome.

There's hAtom that solves this problem already, and appears to have been proliferated by popular blogging software:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=searchmonkeyid%3Acom.yahoo.page.uf.hatom

but I doubt that many users take advantage of it. Almost all of these pages have standard feeds as well (and all of them can provide them via hAtom2Atom proxy).

Maybe a better approach would be to extend hAtom or define extraction in terms of hAtom? (e.g. make <div class="hentry"> and <article> interchangeable?)

> For each article element article that does not have an ancestor article element

That excludes possibility of syndicating article's comments from markup like this:

<body>
<article>
	post
	<article>comment</article>
	<article>comment</article>
</article>
</body>

Feed with only single entry "post" or "post comment comment" would not be useful.

OTOH it may be useful to include all nested comments in a single feed:

	<article>comment
		<article>comment reply</article>
	</article>

Another problem is that algorithm cannot create <summary>. Perhaps <summary> could be assumed if there's alternate link and article doesn't contain more than one header? Or has entire contents wrapped in <blockquote>?

I haven't noticed any way to exclude articles from the feed (except hack <article><article>...</article></article>). I may have news that's not important enough to justify notification of all subscribers. Are trackbacks and tweets appropriate for <article>? I might want to show them on my page, but wouldn't want to repost them in my feeds.

-- 
regards, Kornel Lesinski