On Tuesday, November 2, 2004, at 11:59 AM, Robert Sayre wrote:
Antone Roundy wrote:Okay, I'll rephrase: What publisher on the planet is going to want to alert their users to the fact that they have fixed a trivial spelling mistake like that? I'm sure some will. I, and I suspect most subscribers, will quickly get annoyed and unsubscribe if they make and flag trivial spelling mistakes often (unless our feed readers allow us to ignore atom:updated on those feeds).
I don't see how the Pace requires publishers to "alert their users" to a trivial update. Please explain.
Sheesh. I never said that it did. I was responding to your assertion that:
The format has no business classifying spelling mistakes.with examples of spelling fixes that I think clearly would and would not warrant altering atom:modified (with or without this Pace), and asserting that it is within the spec's scope to include such examples. Of course, if the decision of whether or not to alter atom:modified is up to the publisher, as I'd like it to be, some publishers will chose to alter it for trivial spelling fixes. And just like they would if they wrote meaningless titles, those who do will degrade the quality of their feeds.
Personally, I would prefer the text Bill proposed. I offered the Pace as somewhat of a compromise.
The "atom:updated" element is a Date construct indicating the most recent instant in time when the [feed/entry] was modified in a way the producer considers significant. Ergo, not all modifications necessarily result in a changed atom:updated value.
What exactly is missing from this definition?
The publisher's intent--to draw attention to the modification.
If atom:updated changes, the consumer knows that a "significant" update has taken place, and are free to act on it as they see fit.Yeah, and that information would be only marginally useful as a basis for deciding how I as a consumer saw fit to act on it, because I have no idea whatsoever what the publisher meant by "significant". I don't know whether I as the consumer would want to revisit the article or not, because the publisher would not be able to use this element to signal to me whether they thought the change warranted rereading or not. As I mentioned in a prior message, the "significant" change could be the reordering of two paragraphs--certainly a "significant" change by some measure--but perhaps not one that alters the meaning of the entry in a way that warrants drawing attention to the change.
I don't see how we can get more specific without dictating an editorial policy, which is totally inappropriate.If the current draft text were altered by removing the sentence mentioning spelling fixes and putting in examples along the lines I mention earlier ("I eat people" vs "I seat people", "pumkin" vs "pumpkin", along with examples showing larger changes that do and don't affect the meaning of the entry), and if the examples were prefaced with a remark about how they illustrate generally how atom:updated is to be used, but (as mentioned in the normative text) that the final decision is up to the publisher, do you think that would dictate editorial policy? If so, would you explain how. Even without taking extra care to indicate that the examples are illustrative guidelines and not normative, I don't see it doing that.
