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On Wed, 5 Dec 2007, Ray Denenberg wrote: >> Like... who is the author of a search result? > > And who is the author of an ATOM feed? If the ATOM standard makes author > mandatory, and expects that a meaningful author must always be supplied, > then I have less regard for the "good faith" principle than I've expressed > earlier. For author I would have no regrets saying put in the string > 'author'. The spec says: The "atom:author" element is a Person construct that indicates the author of the entry or feed. And that's it. Thanks, that was really helpful, Atom. One assumes that the author of a feed is the person that creates the feed. Normal, expected usage of these things is for blogs, where the author is the author of the blog. If the <id> in entry is an identifier for the record, then doesn't that make <author> in entry ... the author of the record? Except there's LOTS of data out there that has no author. And that would mean that it was the author of the object being blogged about, not the blogger? So if author is the author of the item in the resultset (see also John Harrison's post) is that the administrator? the searcher? the software? the software's developer? None of which are very useful. Or ... we could just say NO to mandatory ATOM. Your Mileage May Vary, Rob