intertwingly

Authentic Voice of a Person.  Reverse Chronological Order.  On the web.  These are essential characteristics of a online Journal or weblog.

Given the statements above, a well formed log entry would contain at a minimum an author, a creationDate, and a permaLink.  And, of course, content.

As to content, a well formed log entry would have well formed content: in the case of HTML, this would include characters properly escaped, tags perfectly nested and closed.

Content would not be limited to HTML.  It would include images, audio, and video.

There would also be a number of standard extensions:

• An authoring extension would contain the original form of the content (perhaps with tool specific convenience syntax), modification dates, and versioning information.
• An "information engineering" extension would contain heads, decks, and leads as described by Jon Udell.
• A comment extension which would provide information on the number, location, and content for comments, trackbacks, pingbacks, and the like.
• There could even be a Sponsored Links, as pioneered by Google - advertisements that people want, and are clearly labeled as such.

Footnote

At the present time, I would like limit the scope of this wiki to describing a conceptual data model of what constitutes a well formed log entry.  Out of bounds for the moment is any discussion of serialization formats, fine grained data types (lets discuss the whethers and whys of xsi:types later).  I'd also prefer to shy away from detailed discussions about specific use cases in applications as of yet as, except as specifically required to demonstrate the need for a specific entity in the conceptual data model.

If you are willing to live within these bounds, please do contribute to the wiki.  Expand on the extensions on separate pages.  Link to more detail on attributes.  Let everyone know what are essential requirements for your application.