Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
I don't know how much intelligence we expect an Atom Processor to have, but if it is aware of the discussion technology referred to by a link then it could gather and display relevant meta-information about the discussion venue (such as the number of participants in an IRC channel or XMPP groupchat room), fetch the last few threads or the messages in the current thread from a newsgroup or webforum and display a summary of that information (e.g., if there is a specific thread about the Atom feed or entry referred to in the link), etc.
If your Atom processor were capable of doing those things, why would it not want to do them on related links or alternate links? Why is it appropriate to display the number of participants in an IRC channel if you're linking via a discuss link, but it's not appropriate if you're linking for some other reason?
I'm strongly opposed to any link rel proposal that has no potential client implementation, or where the implementation would be the same as existing link relationships.
Regards James
