On 14/09/2005, at 1:06 PM, David Powell wrote:
I'm probably on my own, but I expected Atom's statement that "This specification assigns no significance to the order of atom:entry elements within the feed" was non-negotiable and couldn't be changed by extensions. This seems more like potential Atom 1.1 material to me - it doesn't seem to layer on top of the Atom framework so much as slightly rewrite part of it.
Strictly read, this doesn't preclude other specifications / extensions from adding semantics to the ordering of entries -- it only says that *this* spec doesn't assign any meaning to it. That was the intent as I recall it.
Eg - An Atom library or server that doesn't know about this extension is free to not preserve the entry order, and yet to retain the <fi:ordered /> element, even though this will have corrupted the data.
That is indeed a problem. Probably the easiest way to fix this would be in errata, by adding a statement like "Some feeds may implicitly or explicitly (through extensions) have meaning assigned to the ordering of entries, so intermediaries SHOULD NOT reorder them."
I think that as implemented, this extension wouldn't be safe to deploy without must-understand extensions, which Atom 1.0 doesn't support.
That would be another way to go, but people didn't want mU. Cheers, -- Mark Nottingham http://www.mnot.net/
