Article:		Handling Atom Text and Content Constructs
Subject:		There is text and there is text and...
Date:		2005-12-08 21:29:28
From:		Uche Ogbuji
Response to: Text is text
No one said that anyone should decode a text construct of type text. My point is precisely that it should not be decoded in any way. And as I said in the introduction to the article Atom's purpose is indeed to remove such ambiguity. So I don't understand why you want to reintroduce the ambiguity by sneaking in text. If you want to embed markup, say so in your Atom file. That's what the type attribute is for. And all specs have a spirit. All formal communication has a spirit. It's a consequence of the fact that no human communication is unambiguous. A practical manifestation of the spirit of Atom is the fact that the Atom validator issues warnings. Such a warning can be thought of as something that violates the spirit rather than the letter of a spec. If you have different advice to offer people with regard to type="text", you are entitled. I never told anyone markup in type="text" is illegal. I merely offered my advice to avoid the practice. I stand by that advice.

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• There is text and there is text and...
  2005-12-08 22:25:20 philringnalda
  
  Certainly, avoiding markup in type="text" is good advice, but it should be good advice "because your markup will be displayed rather than being interpreted" rather than "because it's the wrong thing to to do." Having misstated my position and put it too strongly, I don't expect to persuade you at this point, but I do still believe that this puts type="text" in exactly the same position as title in RSS: you simply cannot use a less-than character in it with any hope of it being correctly interpreted.
  
  
  • There is text and there is text and...
    2005-12-08 22:54:52 Uche Ogbuji
    
    OK. I think this means that we don't disagree as strongly as it first seemed, but that you think I wasn't clear enough in the article itself on the reasons for avoiding embedded markup in type="text". I can accept that. I felt that my discussion and references elsewhere in the article on the subject of escaped markup would make the reasons for my advice reasonably clear, but I was probably too laconic in the text immediately leading up to listing 3. If so, I hope this thread helps tease out the matter sufficiently for readers.

    
    Thanks.