intertwingly

Don Box: Tim Ewald, Joe Beda, ChrisAn and I are trying to get the new format for exchanging items working.  Here's a preview of what it looks like now

This format has a number of interesting twists.  First, it is document literal XML which Anonymous [presumably Gary Burd] doesn't particularly feel is vi compatible.  I'd bet that Don's example was entered in Emacs.  Note that the cited xhtml namespace incorrectly points to the same namespace as the blog content.

Like prior iterations from Don, the content is included literally, with no need for encoding.  This brings up two questions: if literal XML encoding is acceptable for the body, why is it all of a sudden unacceptable for headers?  And how should multi-line headers, like the short description (sometimes referred to excerpts) be encoded?

What is also interesting about this example is that it separates the metadata from the content.  While this surprised me, it does makes sense from a SOAP processing model perspective: the one element in the body is intended for the ultimate destination (in SOAP parlance, this is the default actor) and must be understood, the others may be handled by intermediaries and/or disregarded.

I'm not sure what the right split between data and metadata is in this instance.  The split that Don, et. al. proposes does have the disadvantage of precluding the ability to the functional equivalent of pingbacks.