On Oct 17, 2005, at 10:04 AM, Antone Roundy wrote:
4. Is the order of the entries in a feed relevant to this proposal?
...
1) A chain of temporally ordered chunks in the history of a feed
where new entries are tacked onto the end.
2) Search results, where the order of everything all along the
entire chain shifts around all the time.
If you're not going to reconstruct the whole thing, then your
decision function for when to stop may have to be different
depending on how things are ordered.
BTW, case 2 destroys the idea of a "fixed" end and a "live" end.
Having a means to indicate what the ordering is might make it
easier to make the distinction between "next" and "prev" more
intuitive. I'm not sure how else we're going to reconcile
terminology for significance and temporally ordered feeds.
Okay, I've got another idea--switch to totally generic terminology, a
la:
"end-a": the URI of "most significant", "most current",
"prerequisite"[1], etc. end of a sequence of documents, or a randomly
selected end if there is no order.
"end-b": the URI of the "least significant", "least current",
or ...uh, "postrequisite"? end of a sequence of documents or
otherwise the opposite end from "end-a".
"a-ward": the URI of the document next closest to "end-a" in the
sequence.
"b-ward": the URI of the document next closest to "end-b" in the
sequence.
If you have neither "end-a" nor "end-b", then you should use "b-ward"
to traverse out of the subscription document (ie. the subscription
document in that case is assumed to be "end-a").
[1] if the sequence should be read first to last, for example, if
it's a novel broken down into entries, "end-a" points to the place
from which one should start. Which end is "end-a" and which is "end-
b" is somewhat subjective. For example, in a temporally ordered feed,
is it most important to read what's most current, or to understand
the origins of the present first before reading what's most current?
One more thing occurs to me--if this extension is going to be used to
handle things like paging in search results, then it's not really
"feed history", it's "paging".
