A quick thought: the hAtom schema doesn’t include any way to differentiate individual posts within a feed. The format might be paying a little too much attention to blog content, the only publishing channel I can think of that doesn’t regularly feature content chunks. The additional control [to feature an article] would be easy to implement and may help the format catch on at news sites and other traditional publishing channels. It makes more sense than setting up multiple feeds for the same content.
I personally think the hAtom format should also include metadata to describe the intended display of the feed as well (such as number of posts, display characteristics, etc.) just as xml feeds do, but that’s a larger discussion (along with changing the name to hFeed.)
5 Responses to “hAtom and featured content”
[...] As I’ve written before, hAtom could gain fans by including some post metadata. Adding [visual] metadata for the entire feed would be one more cheering point to those of us that still see benefit in the “visual Internet.” Technorati Tags: Tags: No Tags | [...]
“hentry” distinguishes individual entries within a feed and is the primary way hAtom is used. The intention of hAtom is not to provide a new way of doing feeds but to identify semantic content commonly associated with blog posts; it takes the name Atom as we used that to name elements.
Hey David. I wrote that it has no way to differentiate posts, not no way to identify posts (if you look, you’ll see that this blog uses the format.) I agree with you that hAtom doesn’t provide a new way of doing feeds. That’s the problem.
Ah. If you think there’s a sufficient case, just open a page on the microformats wiki and start documenting examples; it’s easy enough to be additive to hAtom.
There’s been plenty of talk in past about HTML-based syndication and it’s generally been though to be a bad idea. This (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/11/26/syndication_is_not_publication) is considered to be the seminal post about the topic.
Excellent. Thanks for the link – I’ll check it out.
Now that I’ve checked it out, I have a couple of comments. First, the article was posted more than four years ago. Even though the article is loosing its relevance, I agree with several points in his post. Personally, I don’t see hAtom as a way to replace RSS. I see it as an alternative. And, if it’s an alternative, it should have some distinguishing features. Featured content and visual metadata would be two that I think would fit well.