Hi Peter,
Thanks for the comments.
On groups—
I don’t doubt there are mechanisms whereby a tree *can* be presented
in terms of categories, and in all honesty I’m not hugely attached to
the proposed atom:group. An atom:feedset containing atom:feeds, each
of which may be categorised in a pretty rich and flexible manner could
work just as well (if not better) and potentially be a more
appropriate fit with Atom as a whole.
My only concern, and it’s a pretty minor one, is that quite a
different model to that used by OPML could hinder any potential
adoption as an alternative to it for many applications. I’m leaning
towards that being a more hypothetical problem than anything else,
though!
Actually, I can think of many cases when I would like to subscribe
to another user's set of subscriptions (although I don't necessarily
think whether users might be likely "subscribe" to a feed needs to
be a primary consideration when deciding whether a set should be
represented by a feed).
I possibly mis-phrased that. Certainly, being able to subscribe to a
set of feeds is useful; that’s part of the motivation for tackling
this in the first place. *However* I don’t think the usual UI
representations of a feed tend to be a good fit for an atom:feed where
each atom:entry in turn represents another feed. In other words,
whichever way you did it, you’d have to modify UAs in any case.
I had a quick read through the drafts you linked to (much appreciated).
Clearly from those, it would be possible to represent a feedset as a
feed/entry, where each entry has a link with a relation of “down”,
containing an ae:inline which contains initial feed metadata and
possibly some entries. It does seem a little like using a
sledgehammer to crack a nut, though.
I’ll readily admit this is fairly subjective, but, it seems more
logical to add a new container to represent a (possibly unrelated)
collection of feeds, when the expression of “a feed” is already well-
defined and more or less left well alone, than shoehorn this into a
feed hierarchy. Although I can see potential applications for the
hierarchy (i.e., situations where you would ordinarily have a feed—
such as for a list of posts, and normally have no way of describing
child feeds—such as a feed of comments on each post), it doesn’t seem
to quite fit with the current feed-related uses of OPML. This isn’t to
say it won’t -technically- fit, as it clearly will (my feedset is
conceptually just a subset of the hierarchy when you boil it right
down), but I’m not sure it’s “right”.
Apologies—that was a bit of a ramble. Hopefully that made sense!
All the best,
Mo.
--
mo mcroberts
http://nevali.net
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