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public String getPaula() {
    return paula;
}</content>

Anonymous http://example.com/id/comments/1532 2006-08-07T06:07:30-04:00 2006-08-07T07:15:35-04:00 First post!

Daily WTF http://thedailywtf.com/ http://example.com/id/trackbacks/3123 2006-08-07T06:07:30-04:00 2006-08-07T07:15:35-04:00

Element Definitions

Unless stated otherwise, all elements are populated similarly to the feed.

atom:feed Element

Populated similarly to the feed. The following differences apply:

• An instance of an Atom Publishing Protocol Category Document SHOULD be included. This defines the list of valid categories which may appear in subsequent atom:entry elements.

• An atom:contributor element is REQUIRED for each defined author. This MAY include registered users which do not have authoring privileges.

atom:entry Element

Populated similarly to the feed. The following differences apply:

• An entrytype category SHOULD be used to indicate the type of entry. For example, the entrytype category can be used to specify a static page instead of a regular blog article, or to disambiguate a trackback from a comment.

• atom:category elements SHOULD be used similarly to the feed, but where these do not match the defined categories in the atom:feed element, they can be assumed to be “tags”. See discussion for app:categories in [APP-id].

• app:control elements MAY be used to indicate the control status for an entry. In particular, draft status may be indicated by the app:draft sub-element.

• A contentsyntax category MAY be used to indicate a syntax for the content element. This MUST only be present when the atom:content element contains text (as indicated by the text attribute), and should be used only when a registered MIME type is not available. See further discussion below regarding atom:content.

Note that content may be inline or out of line, but the former is preferred for obvious reasons.

atom:content Element

This SHOULD be populated with the “raw” content of the item, as it was originally entered by the author. Note this differs from current syndication usage, where the “cooked” (typically HTML) format is used, but it is intended to conform to the usage of this element within the Atom Publishing Protocol.

For example, Markdown and Textile are both commonly-used syntaxes to enable the generation of HTML using textual conventions instead of explicit markup. Although either of these can be used to generate HTML, it is not (in general) feasible to reconstruct the original textual source from HTML. Hence it is highly preferred that all Atom export implementations that implement custom syntax for their content allow exporting in that syntax.

Registered MIME types SHOULD be used in the type attribute, as discussed in [RFC 4287]. Where these are not available (such as for Markdown and Textile, as of this writing), the contentsyntax category SHALL be employed (see below).

There is a potential for interoperability problems here. Specifically, if the syntax chosen by the exporter is not recognised by the importer, or the target publishing platform itself. In this case it is suggested that implementations support a “cooked” mode for content as well. This should be indicated by a suitable MIME type for the type attribute, and the absence of the contentsyntax category.

An xml:space="preserve" attribute MUST be used if whitespace is significant in the content. This is necessary even when the signficance of the whitespace is unambiguously specified by a contentsyntax category.

contentsyntax category

This is an atom:category, constructed as follows.

• The scheme attribute MUST be set to http://purl.org/syndication/export/contentsyntax.

• The term attribute MUST be set to a URL uniquely identifying the syntax (or autopara as noted below)

• The label attribute SHOULD be set to the name of the syntax.

For example, the Markdown syntax would be specified as follows:

A special case is the commonly-encountered syntax which supports a subset of HTML, and additionally inserts <p> and <br/> elements according to whitespace. This syntax is unlikely to be standardised, nor be identifiable from a single URL, hence instead will be identified by term="autopara" instead of a URL.

entrytype category

This is an atom:category, constructed as follows.

• The scheme attribute MUST be set to http://purl.org/syndication/export/entrytype.

• The term attribute MUST be set to one of the following:

  • page for static pages;
  • comment for manually-entered comments;
  • trackback for trackbacks

• The label attribute is optional and undefined.

When comment or trackback is used, it can be assumed that the entry contains feedback on a previously-encountered entry.

References

[RFC 2119] Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels

[RFC 4287] The Atom Syndication Format

[RFC 4685] Atom Threading Extensions

[APP-id] The Atom Publishing Protocol

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Aristotle Pagaltzis and Scott Laird for their comments on drafts of this document.

Revision History

• 2006-09-27: RFC 2119 conformance, various minor cleanups.

• 2006-09-18: Added requirement for xml:space in atom:content where necessary. Removed all export: elements, instead used APP and Thread extensions where appropriate, and category elements otherwise.

• 2006-08-14: Initial draft