Hi,

Creative Commons licenses are embedded in Atom 1.0 feeds as <link rel="license"> tags. Either under <feed> or a spesific <entry>.

An entry could contain both <summary> and <content>. However I only want to license the summary tag, and not the whole thing. Is there any way of marking up the license like that?

// Example entry license
<entry>
   <title type="html">Example entry</title>
   <link type="alternate" href="http://example.com/" />
   <summary type="html">I am a just your neighbor.
      There is nothing more to it.</summary>
   <content type="html">"I am just your neighbor, and a liar--
      By the way, do you have Zoe's phone number?" is a popular
      quote, and a fictional novel from The Scince of Sleep.</content>
   <link rel="license" type="html" href="http://creativecommons.org/ .." />
</entry>

So not the whole thing, just the summary. Suggestions?

Well, you have to understand the nature of the ATOM structure. Each tag has a specific meaning and link tags indicate something related to the particular entry. So, you basically have 4 options as I see it:

1) Deal and stick with how things are,
2) Separate your content entry from your summary entry (I don't have any idea how this would affect your SE rankings or crash people's readers.)
3) Create your own attributes to the summary tag and hope that people will abide by them.
4) Create your own licensing page which indicates that all pages referencing it are under the CC license for the summary information and specifically state the license for the content information.

The last is probably the best way to go as the others have their limitations.

I cannot add a link inside the summary, can I? Like this:

<summary> ... <link rel="license"></summary>

Well, the rel=license is a microformat. So I should be able to add it as a paragrah inside the summary? Like this:

<summary> ... <p style="display: none;"><a rel="license"> .. </a></p></summary>

Or do aggregators only look for links that are childs of entrt tags?

Originally Posted by Moldarin

I cannot add a link inside the summary, can I? Like this:

<summary> ... <link rel="license"></summary>

You can, but there's a problem: your link will be interpreted as a subelement of summary and the text will be essentially corrupted unless you surround both by the CDATA code.

Originally Posted by Moldarin

Well, the rel=license is a microformat. So I should be able to add it as a paragrah inside the summary? Like this:

<summary> ... <p style="display: none;"><a rel="license"> .. </a></p></summary>

This is a better suggestion, but here's the real question: What do you want end users to see? How do you think they're reading this? With my product, for example, humans never read the feed - just a computer program.

Originally Posted by JeremyMiller

(..) What do you want end users to see? How do you think they're reading this? With my product, for example, humans never read the feed - just a computer program.

I want the end user to see the feed (summary, or full content) the way the usually do it. However I want to show that redistributing the feed's <summary> is OK, but not the entire <content>. This information would mostly be aimed at syndication services, I believe.

Originally Posted by Moldarin

I want the end user to see the feed (summary, or full content) the way the usually do it. However I want to show that redistributing the feed's <summary> is OK, but not the entire <content>. This information would mostly be aimed at syndication services, I believe.

In that case it'd depend on the syndication service. An ATOM feed only defines content within a given structure. If a syndication service is programmer to look for a certain tag, e.g. <link rel="license"...> then it will likely act accordingly, but there's no guarantee that any program will respect your wishes.

It's really hard to call with this - if you lean toward your own page which modifies the CC license, then you risk none of the syndication services respecting your rights as none will be able to programmatically determine the nature of the page. If you lean toward any of the other methods then it's likely that the end user's view will be adjusted. Probably the best thing for you to do is to include just link to the CC license and perhaps add another tag not recognized by the ATOM spec which modifies the conditions for the license.

I don't believe there's an easy, guaranteed way around this.