I’m sorry, but I can’t
go on without complaining. Microsoft has proposed extensions which turn
RSS V2.0 feeds into lists and we’ve got folk who are proposing much the
same for Atom (i.e. stateful, incremental or partitioned feeds)… I think
they are wrong. Feeds aren’t lists and Lists aren’t feeds. It seems
to me that if you want a “Top 10” list, then you should simply
create an entry that provides your Top 10. Then, insert that entry in your feed
so that the rest of us can read it. If you update the list, then just replace
the entry in your feed. If you create a new list (Top 34?) then insert that in
the feed along with the “Top10” list. What is the problem? Why don’t
folk see that lists are the stuff of entries – not feeds? Remember, “It’s
about the entries, Stupid…” I think the reason we’ve got
this pull to turn feeds into Lists is simply because we don’t have a
commonly accepted “list” schema. So, the idea is to repurpose what
we’ve got. Folk are too scared or tired to try to get a new thing defined
and through the process, so they figure that they will just overload the
definition of something that already exists. I think that’s wrong. If we want
“Lists” then we should define lists and not muck about with Atom.
If everyone is too tired to do the job properly and define a real list as a
well defined schema for something that can be the payload of a content element,
then why not just use OPML as the list format? What is a search engine or a
matching engine supposed to return as a result if it find a match for a user
query in an entry that comes from a list-feed? Should it return the entire feed
or should it return just the entry/item that contained the stuff in the users’
query? What should an aggregating intermediary like PubSub do when it finds a
match in an element of a list-feed? Is there some way to return an entire feed
without building a feed of feeds? Given that no existing aggregator supports
feeds as entries, how can an intermediary aggregator/filter return something the
client will understand? You might say that the
search/matching engine should only present the matching entry in its results.
But, if you do that what happens is that you lose the important semantic data
that comes from knowing the position the matched entry had in the original
list-feed. There is no way to preserve that order-dependence information without
private extensions at present. I’m sorry but I simply can’t
see that it makes sense to encourage folk to break important rules of Atom by
redefining feeds to be lists. If we want “lists” we should define
what they look like and put them in entries. Keep your hands off the feeds.
Feeds aren’t lists – they are feeds. bob
wyman |
- "Top 10" and other lists should be entries, not ... Bob Wyman
- Re: "Top 10" and other lists should be entr... Henry Story
- Re: "Top 10" and other lists should be entr... Graham
- Re: "Top 10" and other lists should be ... Henry Story
- Re: "Top 10" and other lists should be entr... Mark Nottingham
- Re: "Top 10" and other lists should be ... James M Snell
- Re: "Top 10" and other lists should be ... Graham
- Re: "Top 10" and other lists should... Mark Nottingham
- RE: "Top 10" and other lists should be ... Bob Wyman
- Re: "Top 10" and other lists should... Danny Ayers