On Oct 21, 2005, at 5:03 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
How about:
- Description: A URI that refers to a feed document containing a
set of the most recent entries in the feed. This URI is intended to
be subscribed to to keep abreast of recent changes in the feed;
when different from the URI of the document where it occurs, it
indicates that its value should be used for this purpose in place
of the current document's URI. For example, an archived feed
document might contain a "subscribe" relation that points to the
subscription feed's location, so that clients subscribe to the
appropriate link. Note that the "self" relation was designed for a
similar purpose, but is not suitable for that use in other feeds,
whereas this relation can be used in those situations.
On consideration, I am -1 to rel="subscribe". The reason is this:
one of the big potential value-adds Atom brings is a standards-
compliant way to do one-click auto-subscribe, via <link rel="self" /
>. You are proposing to introduce a <link rel="subscribe" /> which
is there to support autosubscribe. But, it turns out, only in the
special case where the feed is static and you wouldn't actually
subscribe to it. I think the risk of confusing implementors and
weakening the value proposition around <link rel="self" greatly
exceeds the benefit of supporting this special case.
Plus, I think the thing isn't properly named. It isn't actually
"subscribe in the general case", it's "in the special case where the
version you are looking at is static, point to the places where the
changes happen because they don't happen here". So, perhaps we
should consider rel="current-self" or rel="dynamic-version" or some
such.
Finally, markup design that claims to enforce a specific action is
always questionable. The great virtue of descriptive markup in
general is that the tags tell you not what to do with things but what
they are. So on that basis, rel="current-version" or something is
better design. -Tim
