On 19 Feb 2005, at 16:46, Graham wrote:
On 19 Feb 2005, at 11:23 am, Henry Story wrote:
Let me make my point even clearer. If something is "fundamentally incompatible",
then it should be *dead-easy* to prove or reveal this incompatibility.
i) Syndication documents shouldn't ever contain multiple versions of the same entry*.
ii) Archive documents apparently need to be able to contain multiple versions of the same entry.
* for the simple reason that it makes them an order of magnitude harder to process and display correctly (and often impossible to display correctly, since it won't always be clear which is the latest version).
I don't accept that it makes it an order of magnitude harder to process these
documents, or if it is an order of magnitude harder, its an order of magnitude
larger than an infinitesimal amount, which is still an infinitesimal amount.
I am writing such a tool, so I think I have some grasp on the subject.
But accepting for the sake of argument that you are right, you need compare the difficulty of writing a feed reader with the difficulty of writing a feed
itself. Not allowing duplicate versions of an entry in a feed just pushes the
complexity of writing the feed from the feed reader to the feed writer:
now the feed writer has to contain the logic to make sure than no duplicates
appear in the feed. Instead of the feed writer just being able to paste the
new entry to the end of the feed, it has to parse the whole feed document
and make sure it contains no duplicates.
Since I can see very good reasons to make life easier for the feed writer, in the
same way as one has tried to keep html simple for the common html writer, I
think your argument may in fact turn out to be a good supporting argument for
allowing multiple versions of an entry in the same feed document.
Your wittering on about conceptual models doesn't make you better than us.
I never pretended it does make me better.
I have been exploring tools such as rdf, as I believe that they can bring a
lot of clarity to debates such as this one. Just as engineers don't hesitate
to use mathematics to help them in their tasks, so I think using logical
analysis should help us here. I hope that as I understand these tools better
I will be able to explain the insights these disciplines bring in plainer
english.
In the mean time I have a lot of respect for Tim Berners Lee, and I try my best to understand the direction he is going in, the tools he is developing and the insights these lead to.
Henry Story http://bblfish.net/
Graham
