Mark Nottingham wrote:
So, an aggregator comes across a feed in the woods. It sees it has
"previous" and maybe "next" link relations.
The point that (I think) Thomas is making is that the people who
leave that feed document in the woods had better be comfortable with
the aggregator following the links and reconstructing the feed. After
all, most of them already keep feed history without any hints about
previous archives at all; if you give them a "previous" link, it'll
be a red flag to a bull, no matter what my spec says.
So, a feed that used "next" and "previous" to link to different weeks
of the top 100 (for example) would get jumbled up pretty bad, and not
display too well in aggregators.
My thinking is that if we go down this road, one of two things will
happen;
a) Aggregators will start paying attention to special flags (like
fh:incremental) that tell them the nature of the feed, and feeds will
start using them real quick.
b) Non-incremental uses of "previous" and "next" will die off,
because people who use them for those purposes will see aggregators
do strange things with their feeds.
I think (b) is somewhat more likely. Either way, I'm OK, but I do
note that (a) leads to two separate extensions being required in the
feed, when the same purpose could be served by a more specialised
link relation, and (b) will lead to other, more specialised link
relations being created anyway.
So I'm not sure why it's so important we have an effectively semantic-
free "previous" and "next", but if that's what happens, I'm
reasonably confident my use case will still be met.
I'm perfectly happy with leaving previous and next free of any semantics
right now and letting the market sort things out. If more specific link
relations prove to be necessary, then so be it, define the more specific
link relations. If the market can get by with generic links + some kind
of extra flag (e.g. incremental=true, etc) then great. if your case (b)
dies off... that's great too. The point is, let's not over specify this
thing right now; leave it open enough for the market to figure out how
to use it.
- James
