Tim Bray wrote:
On Oct 26, 2005, at 8:51 PM, James M Snell wrote:
A screenshot of a user interface illstrating the use of nested
collections is not a particularly good use case in favor of nested
collections.
I'm not sure if that first sentence came across to well so let me take a
second shot: a screenshot of a user interface showing a nested
collections being used is not a very good demonstration as to why nested
collections are necessary in the first place. It's the equivalent of me
trying to justify to my wife that I need a new car by taking her for a
drive after I've already purchased it.
It establishes that
(a) there are existing implementations that nest collections, and
It establishes that there is an existing implementation (singular) that
is using nested collections to achieve a specific user interface
presentation. Are there other implementations that are doing this? I'm
not being snarky here, I really am not aware of any Atom client other
than Robert's that uses nested collections.
(b) per-blog categories are a plausible use-case for nested collections.
Agreed with the caveat that a "plausible" case does not automatically
imply that it should go into the core. At the most, plausible means
only that we should not rule it out. I'm trying very hard to understand
why nested collections need to be in the core. Further, although the
"Categories" thing is shown in Robert's screenshot, I see no other
mention about collections for individual categories in his pace. Unless
I missed something, none of his example outlines show category
collections so I'm not sure if that's a use case that he's actually
arguing for.
These both seem significant to me. I'm still far from convinced that
XOXO is a good idea, but there are in fact non-obscure use cases for
nested collections.
I actually see two use cases so far that might not be accounted by minor
tweaks to the current status quo: per-category blogs and comment
collections.
At this point I need to ask what the specific requirements are for
per-category collections. Is it really that each category needs it's
own distinct collection? Or is being able to filter a single collection
by category for presentation purposes sufficient? If I want to add a
single entry to two different categories, am I adding to it two separate
collections or is it one collection with two different views?
Regarding collections of comments, I'm not yet sure about those. Still
stewing over it.
- James
