Martin Atkins wrote:
If I'm understanding you correctly, then in the common case of a polling
aggregator the order is skewed unless polling is done very often.
Sorting by published time allows items from multiple feeds to be
intermingled into a single list in the correct order.
Feed readers typically poll every hour. If I receive 20 new posts in that
hour, I couldn't care less what exact order I read them in - I just want to
know that those are the most recent 20 posts.
I know that for some people, some kind of date order (what you refer to as
the "correct" order) is important. So if article A has a publish date, or
update date, or whatever that is 10 minutes before article B, then it's
vitally important that message A gets read before message B, or is it
message B before message A? I just don't get why it's so important.
I bet if you asked, most users couldn't even tell you if they were ordering
by published date or updated date. They just know that how they're doing it
is correct; and vitally important. Right up until the time that it's
inconvenient to have things sorted that way; and then it's the date that is
wrong, not the ordering.
The thing is, if you know that the actual ordering doesn't matter, and it's
more a matter of perception than anything else, it's not that difficult to
come up with an algorithm that gives the perception of sorting by date
without actually doing so.
Regards
James
