On 18 May 2005, at 6:01 am, Eric Scheid wrote:
Not so very long ago you suggested that aggregators look at the content to
determine if it's changed. If it's good enough for aggregators, it's good
enough for publishers (actually better than good enough since the publisher
would be able to do the test before other transformations occur, thus
eliminating some false positives).
But if the publisher does that, atom:modified is going to end up being the date the atom-generating program is run rather than the date the modification happened. You may argue that functionally this doesn't matter, and you'd be right. You'd also be admitting that the absolute date is not important, as long as the dates are in the right order - aka atom:version.
Some are content changes, or metadata changes.
I see no discussion of this distinction in the atom:modified proposal.
an automated date stamp of last modification
a user selectable date stamp of last "significant" update
atom:updated does not have to be user selectable. It's perfectly valid to leave it as the first publishing date, or to use a last modification date.
(Not that either of these are useful - I think atom:updated should be optional, but Tim doesn't listen)
Graham
