The work on using Atom to encode activity streams has raised what seems
to be a more general issue with Atom that I thought I'd bring up over
here to see what insight this group can bring.
In the "normal" case of a feed of entries a user has published,
"published" quiet sensibly represents both the time the entry was
published and the time it appeared in the feed, by definition.
However, when the feed is of something else, these two times are no
longer necessarily the same.
Consider for example the feed that YouTube publishes of a user's
"Favorite Videos". In this feed, the entry-level atom:published tells us
when the entry was added as a favorite, *not* when the entry (i.e. the
video) was posted to YouTube by its author.
However, Digg's equivalent "Favorite Articles" feed (which is actually
RSS 2.0, but let's pretend it's Atom for the sake of this discussion)
has the published time set to the time the article was originally
submitted to Digg, *not* when it was added as a favorite.
My question, then, is which of these approaches is correct. The Atom
specification is (intentionally?) very vague about what this time
represents, but it does refer to "the entry". It's open to
interpretation whether "the entry" means "the actual atom:entry element
in this feed" or "the item that this atom:entry element describes".
Do you think it would be vaulable to have an optional extra element that
indicates when the entry appeared in the current feed/collection? (This
would effectively make YouTube wrong and Digg right.)
(I'm told that Digg couldn't actually implement this element even if it
was specified, because they don't retain a timestamp on their "favorite"
relationships, but at least it would reduce the ambiguity about what
atom:published represents.)
- The distinction between "time this entry was publish... Martin Atkins
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