Antone Roundy wrote:
On Tuesday, November 2, 2004, at 11:59 AM, Robert Sayre wrote:
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".
Nope. Please explain how your proposal defines a uniform definition of "significant" for all users of the Atom format.
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.
Still don't get it. Whether the reordering of a paragraph is important is a matter of editorial policy. Some editorial policies dictate that every change, regardless of their effect on "meaning", are significant.
Your answer shows yet another meaning has been mapped onto atom:updated: that it implies the entry must be reread, which implies that everyone is sitting around reading emailish things. What does it mean for doing actual syndication?
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.
I think you are describing an implementor's guide, where such text would be perfectly at home.
Robert Sayre
