The Atom Publishing Protocol, RFC5023, has been published. The HTML is here, and there’s a Japanese translation by Yamamoto Yohei (who’s appeared in this space before). The Working Group has been closed. Good-bye. This piece is something like the boring bit at the end of a conference where they say all the thank-yous, but I do have some news and ranting to spice things up.
Thank-Yous · Joe Gregorio for having been the first with the idea. Sam Ruby, for being the first leader of the conspiracy. Paul Hoffman, for steering us through the IETF waters and keeping my worst impulses under control. Rob Sayre, Mark Nottingham, and Bill de hÓra, for editing. And all the other people who struggled and labored away mightily on the Working Group, getting the product out the door.
Shutting Down · Ship 1.0, then shut down and go home, for a while at least. This is the correct course of action for a standards group. Any other choice is at best risky. Trust me on this.
What Next for Atompub? · I dunno. I think the world needs it. Joe Cheng at Microsoft will code WLW to use the native WordPress API with WP, and various other native APIs with other things, because they have more features than Atompub (see the comments). If everyone is going to be willing to code their clients to work with every different set of publishing-system idiosyncrasies, then Atompub will have been a waste of time.
But that doesn’t seem plausible to me.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Asbjørn Ulsberg (Oct 23 2007, at 04:32)
A natural step forward now, relevant to your mentioning of Joe Cheng and WLW, is to find out how and why AtomPub falls short of features compared to the proprietary API's and what can be done to remedy those shortcomings. Do we need extensions? An AtomPub 1.1 specification? An "AtomPub for Blogs Implementation Guide"? Something else?
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From: Roland Tanglao (Oct 23 2007, at 15:44)
how about a world wide APP release party / geek fest / interop fest ?
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From: Gostak Sakai (Oct 24 2007, at 11:18)
So,
When will we find the publish button in Open Office? Does anyone at Sun have an idea when this might happen?
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From: Peter Sefton (Oct 24 2007, at 16:29)
@Gostak Sakai:
There is an atompub button for OpenOffice.org but you have to pay Sun $10 for it - I tried the first version a year ago and it was so bad I asked for (and got) a refund. As far as I can tell it will produce really bad HTML as it doesn't do anything to improve on the broken HTML export that ships in Writer.
The project (http://ice.usq.edu.au) I work on is developing a button which will work with both Word and OOo. It tackles not only the protocol but easy-to apply styles and XHTML export as well. Contact me via my site if you'd like to try it out.
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