Version 1.3 of the Info Bite List specification saw daylight on Saturday. Along with a few other tweaks, I removed support for multipart content types as a result of some research prompted by an entry on Tim Bray's blog.

On Friday, Tim raised the issue of how one goes about posting, for example, an image and then referencing it from a blog entry. Some had suggested posting the image and blog entry together, both in the content element, as multipart/alternative. Aside from that fact that it should probably be multipart/related or multipart/mixed, this method created certain difficulties and issues (which I won't go into here--check Tim's blog for more details). Tim's suggestion of posting the image as a separate entry with a new attribute to indicate that it shouldn't show up as a stand-alone item in the feed didn't feel quite right to me either, so, contrary to prior expectations for myself (based on the acrimony in the RSS community), I finally decided to get involved in the Atom community. You can now find some of my opinions on the wiki and in the Atom syntax mail list.

Okay, you don't care. But it's an exciting step for me.

So, why the change to the Info Bite List spec? Here's the part of this post with the useful information: when I first wrote in support for multipart/alternative, I just assumed that the issue had been hashed out between the Atom folks and they'd settled on it because it was a great idea. I thought that everything in the version 0.3 spec was decided, and that the remaining 0.7 of version 1.0 would be made up by adding more details and perhaps more elements. It turns out that 0.3 is a snapshot of the current state of the discussion, from one (or more?) person's point of view, with one of the popular options chosen where issues remain unresolved. That was a revelation! Atom 1.0 could conceivably be a very different beast from 0.3, though I doubt that the core is going to change radically before 1.0.

Info Bite List changed because I now have an informed opinion, which is that multipart/alternative isn't the right way to go. If I'm directly involved with Atom now, why continue with Info Bite List, you ask? Mostly because, while I'm happy to do my little part to make Atom the best it can be, I disagree on some points with the majority view in the Atom community.

Or do I? Maybe the points where we disagree are really still undecided.