Creating a powerful API for publishing is currently our top priority, and to improve our AtomPub service we recently added support for hierarchy in AtomPub.

Nikunj R. Mehta & Colm Divilly recently released 2 Internet-Drafts: one about collection discovery and the other one about hierarchy.

Internet-Drafts are still works in progress, but since the behavior for collection discovery was already described in a previous RFC, and the rel values used in the hierarchy draft are consistent with those registered at the IANA link registry, we decided to implement both of these drafts.

Collection discovery

Collections can be discovered in our feeds now (for example /book/id/contents.atom), and they’re not limited to the service document anymore. In the feed for a book you’ll find the following code:

<app:collection href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/id/contents.atom">
  <app:accept>application/atom+xml;type=entry</app:accept>
  <title>Add new entries</title>
  <app:categories fixed="yes">
    <category term="Part"/>
    <category term="Chapter"/>
    <category term="Section"/>
    <category term="Text"/>
  </app:categories>
</app:collection>

Hierarchy

Hierarchy is supported through:

<link rel="down" ah:count="2" href="..."/>

ah:count is used to count the number of entries in the child feed, and in the child feed you’ll get a new collection to add new entries.