Remembering the Future

If you want to be human-readability-oriented, you can deliver things like Calendars and Contacts over Atom using structured XHTML (i.e. microformats) as the payload. Alternately, it might be more appropriate in a given setup to use a more general data format for the payload such as RDF/XML (which is what DOAP uses). That’s fine: the Atom content element has a type attribute, so the payload format can be easily declared

Don’t forget that you can always stick some human-readable HTML rendition into atom:summary if your atom:content payload is machine-readable data. I consider this summary/content distinction one of the most crucial and underappreciated value propositions of Atom.

Topics: Atom | MicroFormats | Workflow