Should item_assets be required in core?

[aznan2]

Having the field item_assets be required i collections makes sense when Item Assets is its own extension, but if it is required in core I can see some possible issues. The field works well when the collection is of a set of homogeneous data, but questions arise of what happens when the data is gathered from disparate sources - perhaps from different users posting in items to a server that implements the Transaction extension. For example, what happens if users add two items with the following assets:

"assets": {
  "image": {
    "title": "Image",
    "description": "The image",
    "href": "...",
    "type": "image/tiff",
    "roles": ["data"]
  },
  "thumb": {
    "title": "Thumbnail",
    "description": "A thumbnail image",
    "href": "...",
    "type": "image/tiff",
    "roles": ["thumbnail"]
  }
}

"assets": {
  "image": {
    "title": "The City",
    "description": "Satelite image over The City",
    "href": "...",
    "type": "image/png",
    "roles": ["data"]
  },
  "image-small": {
    "title": "The City",
    "description": "Same, but the houses are tiny",
    "href": "...",
    "type": "image/png",
    "roles": ["thumbnail"]
  }
}

In this case, in item_assets, what should the title of the image key be? And since it may be difficult to control what keys the users use, as with the thumbnail in this example, the map may potentially grow very large.

[m-mohr]

Good catch, thanks.
item_assets is not meant to be required, it is a copy&paste mistake on our end, just in the written Markdown documentation.
The JSON schema doesn't enforce item_assets fortunately.
See PR #1314