Tim Bray wrote:
On Feb 2, 2005, at 12:15 PM, Robert Sayre wrote:
1.) A web forum, where one post serves as the root of a collection of other posts.
HTML-- http://groups-beta.google.com/group/bloggerDev/
Atom 0.3, "root" posts only-- http://groups-beta.google.com/group/bloggerDev/feed/topics.xml
Atom 0.3, all messages-- http://groups-beta.google.com/group/bloggerDev/feed/msgs.xml
Q: Has any previous flavor of RSS had a solution for this?
By reference, there is wfw:commentrss. That's typing of items/entries by the type of link relation that points to them. That means you're going to have people calling things "comments" to get the interface to happen. It's nesting.
Potential solutions that occur to me:
1. Ignore the problem 2. PaceEntriesElement could handle this 3. PaceFeedRecursive could handle this 4. PaceAtomHeadInEntry could handle this 5. PaceAggregationDocument could handle this
I honestly can't say which I prefer. Would anyone like to try to put together examples of the solution in #2 through #5 so that we can consider the alternatives?
I will put together examples for all of the alternatives, and I will add one more example: planetsun.org.
2.) A Blog w/ comments, where on post serves as the root of a collection of other posts.
HTML-- http://www.livejournal.com/users/giant_moose/
Atom 0.3, no indication of comments-- http://www.livejournal.com/users/giant_moose/data/atom
Q: Has any previous flavor of RSS had a solution for this?
No, but the problem isn't that hard. I wouldn't be surprised if LJ has some private format for this, but I don't know if they do.
Q: Do we have a proposal on something to handle this?
PaceEntriesElement would do it.
I believe there is a proposal for a <link rel="comment"> which would do the job.
It wouldn't handle that example. The comments are nested. XML elements nest pretty well. It would handle the first case... but only by reference. You couldn't "subscribe to posts with comments".
3.) A "List Status" feed, where the only updates consist of one collection replacing another.
RSS2 -- http://rss.netflix.com/Top100RSS
background info--
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=a257ba40-b9fd -4cba-959a-2bba6ae917f0
Q: Has any previous flavor of RSS had a solution for this?
Yes. http://npg.nature.com/pdf/newsfeeds.rdf, or there is OPML.
Q: Do we have a proposal for something to handle this?
Yes, any of the "organization" Paces would take care of this, other than the ordering problem, which no Pace addresses.
Dare points out that the feed suffers from lack of guids and dates, something that Atom would force them to fix, which would give an aggregator a better chance of doing something useful. -Tim
Nesting collections would make the situation explicit.
Robert Sayre
