Brian Smith wrote:
Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> On 05/28/2008 4:02 PM, James Holderness wrote:
> > If your Atom processor were capable of doing those things,
> > why would it not want to do them on related links or
> > alternate links?
>
> We've been down this path before. The "related" relation is void for
> vagueness, since *everything* is related, otherwise why are
> you linking?
I agree. If you require a specific kind of processing then "related"
is not appropriate.
Except a "discuss" link doesn't require a specific kind of processing - at
least none that has been disclosed so far. If it did, I wouldn't have a
problem with it.
For example, a xmpp:// link could be a link to a discussion or a link
to an Atom-over-XMPP push subscription service. AFAICT, the only way
to distinguish between the two would be to use different link
relations for each usage.
And an http link could be a link to a porn site or a link to a news site,
but without a "porn" link relationship there would no way to distinguish
between the two. We really need a whole lot more of these: "news",
"shopping", "sport", videos". We should define link relationships for every
possible category of web site.
Obviously that is ridiculous. Yes, we can't tell the difference, but why
should we care? Why does a client *need* to be able to distinguish between
links to discussions and links to anything else? Human readers obviously
care where something is linking, but that's why we have the title attribute.
"related" should be used when you need to store a link for some reason
and you don't care if/how it is exposed to any users along the way.
That implies that you *do* care how "discuss" links are exposed to users.
Please let me know *specifically* what you had in mind. I'm not asking for
REQUIRED behaviour - just your idea of what a perfect client *should* do.
Also, please explain why a client *shouldn't* perform the same processing on
other link types, such as "related" or "alternate".
Peter, are clients supporting rel='discuss' already?
Please do tell us if that is the case. It would make this dicussion so much
easier if you could provide real examples of clients that are doing
something useful with these links.
As a feed publisher, if I wanted to link to an IRC channel, news forum or
mailing list where people were actively discussing a post, I would want the
readers of my feed to *see* that link and be able to click on it and join
the discussion. Right now I can get that functionality in a number of feed
readers using a "related" link. If I were to change my link to use
"discuss", it would suddenly become invisible. My feed would become
significantly less functional.
So why are you trying to convince people that this is a good idea? I'm
assuming you're not deliberately trying to make their feeds less functional.
So what is the great gain they'll get from using a "discuss" link that makes
this loss of functionality worthwhile? Where are the clients that are
supporting (or planning to support) "dicuss" links in some incredible way
that makes this all worthwhile?
Regards
James
