Content Unbecoming

Sam Ruby comments in his own blog...

I will merely point out that I’ve dealt with formats and protocols which are “explicitly not intended for human readability” and I’ve learned to avoid them.

And Bill de hÓra comments further down...

Atompub/Atom shines light on the fact we have serious issues around sharing and “understanding” structured content. Complaining about the source of light isn’t sensible.

So, to me, this is like the web services debates rehashed half a decade later. The only interesting difference in this thread is the level the argument is happening - around the content/payload/mediatype instead of wire/transfer...

Maybe it’s not as obviously random at this time to argue that per silo data access formats are a good idea...

Fwiw, “technically”, I don’t see why facebook don’t serve class laden XHTML and document the attributes.

And along the way James Snell compares to Yaron's example...

<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <id>tag:example.org,2005/someuser/profile</id>
  <title>Some User's Profile</title>
  <updated>2000-01-01T00:00:00Z</updated>

  <author><name>Profile System</name><author>
  <content type="xhtml">
    <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
      <div class="profile">
        <div class="section" id="professional">

          ...
        </div>
        <div class="section" id="personal">
          ...
        </div>
        <div class="section" id="clothingPreferences">
          ...
        </div>

      </div>
    </div>
  </content>
</entry>

Looks good. Damn. Even *this* xml-hater (yours truly) has had trouble realizing all that one-off stuff is bogus.