On 16/08/2005, at 9:17 AM, Stefan Eissing wrote:
Ch. 5 similar: "MUST occur unless". If the document is an
archive there are only 2 possiblities: either fh:prev is there or
not. If not it will always "terminate" the archive list, won't
it? You seem to have a (server-side) model in mind which drives
the document structure. From a client perspective, there are only
the documents and it derives its own model from that.
Not sure what you mean here; are you saying that fh:archive is
superfluous?
Currently:
The document first defines "archive documents" and *afterwards*
requires that fh:archive MUST be present in archive documents.
My proposal:
Introduce fh:archive with the semantics that the server garantuees
that the set of entries in this document will not change over time
if fh:archive is present. A document with fh:archive in it (and its
implied semantics) is then called an "archive document".
To tackle it from another view: The spec should say "servers MUST
NOT break the promises of fh:archive" instead of saying "archive
documents MUST announce that they do not change". There is possible
harm in breaking the first, but only suboptimal performance in
neglecting the latter case.
I made it loose purposefully; I think there are several types of
archives out there, and it's likely that further specs are going to
come along that talk about the guarantees surrounding persistence,
entry deletion, etc. Again, I want to avoid, as much as possible,
defining what a feed is in this document, as there are many potential
models for feeds.
For example, an archive in my blog feed can change for spelling
mistakes and updates, but an archive of telephone records used for
SOX compliance can't. Mandating a particular definition of what an
archive is would necessitate ruling some types of archives out, and
that wasn't my main use case for this; rather, it was to make sure
that archive feeds (as defined for the purposes of this spec)
wouldn't be accidentally subscribed to.
Cheers,
--
Mark Nottingham http://www.mnot.net/
