Mark Nottingham wrote:
Right. A few questions that pop up:
1) Is it a closed or open set? If it's open (and I think 99% of feeds
are), what does "last" mean?
My answer is that it's probably an open set, so "last" doesn't mean
much that's useful (unless it's conflated with the subscription feed;
see below).
My answer would be: if "last" is used, it's a closed set; if "last" is
not used, it's an open set.
2) What's the relationship between these feed documents and the feed
document that people subscribe to?
I think the subscription feed needs to be pinned to one end of the
set (which is what FH does now). Otherwise, it becomes difficult to
figure out whether you have the complete set or not by polling.
I think this will be dependent on the context in which the link rels are
used. The "subscription" link rel you've suggested is a good solution
to this problem. Within any of the feeds in the set, the "subscription"
link rel would point to the feed that should be subscribed to --
regardless of whether the subscription feed appears at the start or end
of the set.
On 14/10/2005, at 3:16 PM, James M Snell wrote:
The way I look at this is in terms of a single linked list of
feeds. The ordering of the entries within those feeds is
irrelevant. The individual linked feeds MAY be incremental (e.g.
blog entries,etc) or may be complete (e.g. lists,etc). Simply
because a feeds are linked, no assumption should be made as to
whether or not the entries in those feeds share any form of ordered
relationship.
<link rel="first" /> is the first feed in the linked list
<link rel="next" /> is the next feed in the linked list
<link rel="previous" /> is the previous feed in the linked list
<link rel="last" /> is the last feed in the linked list.
Terms like "top", "bottom", "up", "down", etc are meaningless in
this model as they imply an ordering of the contents.
For feed history, it would work something like:
<feed>
...
<link rel="self" href="...feed1" />
<link rel="next" href="...next" />
<link rel="last" href="...feed3" />
...
</feed>
<feed>
...
<link rel="self" href="...feed2" />
<link rel="previous" href="...feed1" />
<link rel="next" href="...feed3" />
<link rel="first" href="...feed1" />
<link rel="last" href="...feed3" />
...
</feed>
<feed>
...
<link rel="self="href="...feed3" />
<link rel="previous" href="...feed2" />
<link rel="first" href="...feed1" />
...
</feed>
- James
Mark Nottingham wrote:
At first I really liked this proposal, but I think that the kind
of confusion you're concerned about is unavoidable; the terms you
refer to suffer "bottom-up" vs. "top-down."
I think that defining the terms well and in relation to the
subscription feed will help; after all, the terms don't surface in
UIs, so it should be transparent.
On 14/10/2005, at 10:37 AM, Antone Roundy wrote:
Which brings me back to "top", "bottom", "up" and "down". In the
OpenSearch case, it's clear which end the "top" results are going
to be found. In the syndication feed case, the convention is to
put the most recent entries at the "top". If you think of a feed
as a stack, new entries are stacked on "top". The fact that
these terms are less generic and flexible than "previous" and
"next" is both an advantage and a disadvantage. I think the
question is whether it's an advantage in a significant majority
of cases or not. What orderings would those terms not work well
for?
--
Mark Nottingham Principal Technologist
Office of the CTO BEA Systems
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--
Mark Nottingham Principal Technologist
Office of the CTO BEA Systems
