Tom, can you explain why I (or anyone else) should implement hAtom on a blog - especially if I already provide an Atom feed? I won't do it just because you say so ;)
Keith
ps: As a reader, I appreciate titles, as it's easier to refind posts.
I use hAtom mostly for styling (I style 'hentry' I think...). And it means that people can programatically access your stuff using JavaScript.
For the RDF-illiterate (heh, just kidding), microformats have a lot of value, as they are another hook for hackiness - with CSS and JavaScript.
The reason I don't title short entries is because it reads strangely. If I make a post like "Such-and-such has done something interesting. Go read about it.", there really isn't a title that it should have. Some cartoons in newspapers don't have titles either. The reason is that it would be insulting to a reader to say "this here is a cartoon!". Unfortunately, Atom seems yet another application of "follow the cowpaths" - cut off anyone who strays from the cowpath!
2007-08-06EDT20:39:41+00:00
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For the RDF-illiterate (heh, just kidding), microformats have a lot of value, as they are another hook for hackiness - with CSS and JavaScript.
The reason I don't title short entries is because it reads strangely. If I make a post like "Such-and-such has done something interesting. Go read about it.", there really isn't a title that it should have. Some cartoons in newspapers don't have titles either. The reason is that it would be insulting to a reader to say "this here is a cartoon!". Unfortunately, Atom seems yet another application of "follow the cowpaths" - cut off anyone who strays from the cowpath!
A particular use case to consider is "I have a chunk of text selected on a page, and I want to post it to my blog with the correct permalink attached". With hAtom your javascript can find the rel="bookmark" link within the containing hentry, and get a title and author to cite nicely too; (falling back on the whole page for non-feed-like pages). Without it, you either need to go look in the head for the feed and then pattern-match the text to find the same entry, or you need to have a parser that handles an arbitrary blog's markup (I wrote one of those at Technorati, and believe me it wasn't pretty).
As for your title problem, a lot of feed readers will extract the first few words of the post as a title. You could help this along by enclosing the first few words of untitled posts in a span with class 'entry-title'
PS Tom, it wasn't just my blog, I made it so that any new Blogger blog will have hAtom by default, and that anyone who already uses (or switches to) the new template model gets it too. The nice thing about the Blogger team's template code was that this was actually less work than just doing mine before...
2007-08-07EDT00:29:43+00:00
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As for your title problem, a lot of feed readers will extract the first few words of the post as a title. You could help this along by enclosing the first few words of untitled posts in a span with class 'entry-title'
PS Tom, it wasn't just my blog, I made it so that any new Blogger blog will have hAtom by default, and that anyone who already uses (or switches to) the new template model gets it too. The nice thing about the Blogger team's template code was that this was actually less work than just doing mine before...
