Eric Scheid wrote:
Ask yourself these questions: which is the "first" message in this thread,
and if you wanted to understand the thread would you start there, or at
the
most recent entry in this thread and read backwards. Remember that by the
time you've read back to the initial posting there would likely now be
even
more entries into this thread, so where would you then read them from ...
where you started and going forward in time, or would you jump to the most
recent and then read backwards until you hit a message you already read?
This makes perfect sense if you're a human reading messages, but now try and
understand it from the point of view of a computer program (an Atom
processor). The computer doesn't care which messages came first. It's not
going to try and read the messages and make sense of them. It just wants to
retrieve all the documents in the most efficient way possible.
First off is has to start with the most recent document since that's what
the user is going to subscribe to. From there, the most sensible thing to do
would be to keep following links back in time to older and older archives
until it has retrieved all of them or (if this is a feed that has been
downloaded before) until it reaches an archive that it has previously
retrieved.
While it's theoretically possible to obtain a link from the subscription
document back to the oldest archive and then make your way forward in time
that wouldn't be very efficient when you've most likely already retrieved
all of those old archives.
From an aggregator's point of view, you really don't have that much choice -
going backwards in time is the only sensible thing to do. Which is why
aggregator developers tend to think of the most recent document as "first",
and subsequent documents (back in time) as "next".
Technically these documents don't even have to be archives - they could just
as easily be chunks of search results. The dates on the messages don't even
come into play - an Atom processor wouldn't treat them any differently.
I don't dispute that you have valid reason for thinking that forwards in
time is the way to go, but please don't assume those of us that think the
opposite are necessarily insane.
Regards
James
