Mark Nottingham wrote:
The approach I took in -04 was to say that the pseudo-ordering introduced by the mechanism was ONLY meaningful for the purposes of reconstituting the feed; it's still up to the feed itself to determine what the ordering of entries means (or doesn't). That avoids a lot of problems, although it does require some careful wording.
The ordering of the entries may not matter, but the ordering of the documents does. Starting with the active feed document, you need to know whether you should be following a series of "prev" links or "next" links in order to traverse the archives back through time. While your feed history spec used "prev" for that purpose, previous implementations of atom:link appear to have used "next".
I can see the justification for both choices and don't particularly mind either way. However if the final decision is to go with "prev" rather than "next" I think there should at least be a note to the effect that there may be existing implementations of Atom 0.3 using "next".
Also -- I'd think that the "last" link is already covered by "self," no? If not, there's some pretty serious confusion about what 'self' means.
I was going to suggest that initially but I don't think it's strictly true. The spec says that "self" identifies a resource *equivalent* to the containing element. Considering that an archived document and the active feed document will quite likely have no entries in common I think it's a bit of a stretch to claim them equivalent. "Derived" would be a better relationship IMHO.
Not that I care, mind you. Just pointing out that such a usage may conflict somewhat with the spec.
Regards James
