RFC 4946
RFC 4946: “This memo defines an extension to the Atom Syndication Format for describing licenses associated with Atom feeds and entries.”
The Atom License Extension is now Experimental RFC 4946.
What is the Atom License Extension? Glad you asked. RFC 4946 defines the way things like Creative Commons licenses can be associated with Atom feeds and entries.
<entry>
<id>tag:entries.org,2005:1</id>
<title>Atom Powered Robots Run Amok</title>
<updated>2005-06-28T12:00:00Z</updated>
<link href="http://www.example.org/entries/1" />
<summary>Atom Powered Robots Run Amok</summary>
<author><name>Jane Smith</name></author>
<link rel=”license” type=”text/html”
href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/” />
</entry>
Why is this an Experimental RFC? Simple, while there are folks who produce Atom feeds that contain the license link, there are very few client implementations that do anything interesting with them. The lack of implementation experience means that “Experimental” status is far more appropriate than “Proposed Standard” status. Once we get more implementations, we can look at putting this on the standards track.
Support for RFC 4946 has already been added to the Apache Abdera project in the Extensions module.