It seems to me that there is a real need for a one stop shop for
the information necessary to understand the 'how' behind
syndicating, archiving and editing episodic web sites. Specs
are good, but they only tend to cover what is not covered by other
specifications. Blogs and mailing lists often provide a much
needed missing context for the information, but the discussions
found there are often inconclusive and it is virtually impossible
to determine if the decisions made have been superseded.
Your noting (with example :-)) that How-To's are important.
I'd also appreciate hearing where (and when?) do "Best Practices" documentation fit into a specification roll-out picture.
Dean, I'm actually (and intentionally) trying to conflate the two. There is nothing in HTTP that requires certain headers to be used. In fact, HTTP/1.0 doesn't even mention host (a header that now is required).
ETags are certainly a best practice. A practice that can't be mandated by the spec.
Is there already a QA validation tool for these sites. One that critiques the auto discovery, feeds, trackbacks, geolocation tag, offers up suggestions. People do love to get 100% on a test.
This is a lovely supplement to the spec, Sam. Every spec should be riddled with examples and simple walk-throughs like this. Great work. And Ben is right. (Automated) test-cases are lovely. You can never have too many [100% valid] buttons on your website. §;-)
In the next installment of the atom guide, I tackle what may very well be the number one issue in ill-formed feeds: character encoding in general, and smart quotes in particular. In the process of producing this documentation, I am struck by two thing...
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