On 5 May 2005, at 17:53, Graham wrote:
On 5 May 2005, at 4:22 pm, Henry Story wrote:
If you don't want to keep a history of the entries all you need to do is drop all but the
latest entry with the same id. There is nothing more to it. Just show the user the last
one you came across.
But, if we follow Eric's model of how a wiki changelog should be defined, I'll be missing entries in the log, because several different entries have the same id. Ergo, the user interface and data model for the new type of feed this proposal permits is very different.
If your tool (Is it Shrook2? [1]) only shows people the latest version available to you of
an entry, then by showing them only the latest version, Shrook2 will be giving the user what
he is expecting.
When your news reader currently reads feeds on the internet what does it do
with changed entries? Either it keeps the older version around, for the user to browse, or it
does not. If your users don't mind you throwing away the older versions of an entry, then
they won't mind you throwing away the older versions of the above entries either. There is no
difference in the behavior between allowing changed entries across feed documents and changed
entries inside a feed document. People who place two entries with the same id inside a feed
document should be aware that tools like yours will have the behavior they do, and that this is
ok.
Other people may be interested in looking at things historically. They will get a historical
viewer and be happy with it.
I think the current proposal is good exactly because it allows the wiki people to express
what they want to express correctly. Namely how their wiki entry is changing over time.
This proposal permits this, and it does not harm anyone else.
It harms everyone, by allowing a second, unrelated data model in Atom feeds. They may not be posting today, but I assure you, when other aggregator authors get the first user complaints about how Eric's wiki log displays incompletely in their program, they'll forgive Dave Winer everything.
Again, has anyone yet complained to you that you have not kept a historical and browse-able track
record of how the entries Shrook2 is looking at have changed over time? Clearly they could,
as you sometimes let them know that an entry that they already have read has been updated. They
could ask you what the changes were, no? How it changed, etc.
If your users don't care that much about the history of an entry, then you can dump all but the
latest entry. Or you could just keep the last two entries, so that you can show them a diff.
Graham
HJStory http://bblfish.net/blog/
[1] http://www.fondantfancies.com/apps/shrook/
