Afternoon all,<div><br></div><div>Though the main call was shorter than usual yesterday afternoon, Gary, Shlomo, Andre and myself pressed on for 3 hours to see if consensus could be found (again) on the formats issue. This is clearly something people feel strongly about so it&#39;s unsurprising that it&#39;s taken us this long to get this far, but I think we&#39;ve finally found a happy medium (touch wood).</div>
<div><br></div><div>Here&#39;s my take (3 hours condensed into 3 lines):</div><div><ul><li>Our number one priority is machines (rather than users) so we want native representations defined by existing standards (e.g. OVF) over home-grown (POX) and/or human-friendly ([X]HTML) representations.</li>
<li>Resources are &quot;enhanced&quot; by metadata which consists of links to other resources, categories, attributes, etc. and HTTP provides a perfectly good metadata channel in the form of HTTP headers so we&#39;ll use these to expose this information.</li>
<li>We&#39;ll also define a single, XHTML5 based representation that is usable by both users and machines. All of the information that appears in the headers will also appear within the XHTML5 rendering such that &quot;enterprise applications&quot; can extract it with XPath/XSLT/etc. without having to look at the headers.</li>
</ul><div>I&#39;m very happy with this compromise, which basically involved elevating both existing documents to the &quot;must&quot; requirement level. The load for implementors is minimised and both simple and complex clients are supported. Furthermore it does not restrict the roadmap and enables us to trivially add support for semantic web technologies including microformats and RDFa which I know will make some people on this list very happy.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Thanks everyone for your perseverance with this issue. Please speak now if there&#39;s any comments, questions or concerns about this (or forever hold your peace :)</div><div><br></div><div>Sam</div><div>
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