I'm confused. What about desktop feed readers that aren't running so can't poll every hour? How would they show sensible results after the user fires them up for the first time that week or month.
Anyway, this discussion seems moot because most feed reading apps today sort by published date today so it seems weird to be discussing breaking behavior expected by hundreds of deployed apps. -- THINGS TO DO IF I BECOME AN EVIL OVERLORD #139 If I'm sitting in my camp, hear a twig snap, start to investigate, then encounter a small woodland creature, I will send out some scouts anyway just to be on the safe side. (If they disappear into the foliage, I will not send out another patrol; I will break out the napalm.) -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of James Holderness Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2009 2:27 AM To: Atom Syntax Subject: Re: The distinction between "time this entry was published" and"time this entry was added to this feed" 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
