A. Pagaltzis wrote:
* Eric Scheid <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005-10-21 17:05]:
It was thought that the 'self' link in an archive would point
to the archive document itself, which meant a different
relationship was needed for the purpose of locating the URI
which is the one that contains the most recent updates/entries.
I admit I intentionally kept out of that discussion because I
don’t have a lot of personal interest in the subject, and the
thread has been so fast and furious I didn’t bother staying on
top of it just because.
But I’d like to offer some thoughts on this particular point;
apologies in advance if these points have already been raised:
First, rel="self" is going to be implemented by most everything
that groks Atom 1.0 in order to support one-click subscription,
if applicable, right? Whereas this new relationship might not
find such wide-spread support.
Most aggregators supporting self-based subscription are going to use it
to allow the UA to subscribe to the *current* document. In other words,
if the user is looking at an Archive feed, the self-subscription
mechanism will lead the user to subscribe to the archive document. With
"subscribe", the UA is given a hint as to where the actual subscription
document is located.
Second, although less important – even applications which do
support rel="subscribe" will have to implement a fallback
behaviour. Arguably, they already do in some fashion, because a
feed may omit the rel="self" link, so I don’t know if this is
such a pressing issue.
For these two (similar) reasons I think it might be wise to keep
rel="self" in the role that this new rel="subscribe" thing is
supposed to fulfill, and invent a new relationship that can point
to the canonical location of the archive feed document.
-1. self always points to *this* document and is only usable for
subscribing to *this* document. You cannot use it to point to a
separate document.
- James
