Dare Obasanjo wrote:
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.
... especially given that they're not likely to change no matter what is
discussed here...
- James
--
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
