On 10/14/05, Antone Roundy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Oct 14, 2005, at 11:13 AM, Mark Nottingham wrote: > > On 14/10/2005, at 9:22 AM, Lindsley Brett-ABL001 wrote: > >> I have a suggestion that may work. The issue of defining what is > >> "prev" and "next" with respect to a time ordered sequence seems to > >> be a problem. How about defining the link relationships in terms > >> of time - such as "newer" and "older" or something like that. That > >> way, the collection returned should be either "newer" (more recent > >> updated time) or "older" (later updated time) with respect to the > >> current collection doc. > > > > A feed isn't necessarily a time-ordered sequence. Even a feed > > reconstructed using fh:prev (or a similar mechanism) could have its > > constituent parts generated on the fly, e.g., in response to a > > search query. > > > The OpenSearch case mentioned by Thomas is what convinced me that > terms related to temporal ordering aren't appropriate (what a pity, > since "newer" and "older" are the perfect terms for time ordered > sequences of feed documents!) > > "Previous" and "next" suffer from the fact that they could easily be > interpreted differently in different use cases. For example, for > OpenSearch results "pages", clearly "prev" points to the search > results that come up "on top" and "next" to the lower results. But in > a conventional syndication feed, "next" could easily be taken to mean > either "the next batch of entries as you track back towards the > beginning of time from where you started (which is usually going to > be the growing end of the feed)", or "a batch of entries containing > the entries that were published next after the ones in this batch." > I'd have to look at the document to remind myself of which "next" > means, because either makes just as much sense to me.
True, but I don't think that means that the terms have to be abandoned, but that these examples need to be supported by spec text. That is, define 'next' as pointing to the next document in a series of documents, the whole series of documents containing a series of Atom Entries whose order is specific to the service providing it. -joe -- Joe Gregorio http://bitworking.org
