On Oct 24, 2005, at 8:13 AM, James Holderness wrote:
With what we have so far we can do incremental feed archives; we
can do at
least some form of searching; we can do non-incremental feeds (of
the "Top
10" variety) with history. I think that's a good start.
But we also want paged non-incremental feeds (OpenSearch result
feeds),
while "non-incremental feeds with history" have not yet proven to be
needed.
I still don't see why OpenSearch result feeds can't be implemented
as incremental feeds.
Perhaps they can, but that wouldn't always be desirable. Consider
this scenario: Somebody writes a program that searches Google,
scrapes the HTML results, and publishes them as an Atom feed. My
purpose in subscribing to the feed is not to be alerted when a new
webpage is added to page 20 of Google's results, it's to be alerted
whenever a new webpage makes it onto page 1. So I don't want new
pages added to the live end of the feed--I just want whatever is
currently in the top 10 results, and my feed reader will tell me when
one of them is one it hasn't seen before.
Either they're being used as a one-off search and you can't
subscribe to them (in which case there is no difference between
incremental and non-incremental), or they're being updated with new
results over time (like a filtered aggregate feed) in which case I
would think they have to be incremental.
Given the above scenario, why wouldn't you be able to subscribe to them?
I'm proposing previous/next linking from chunk to chunk inside the
same
snapshot and adding a new link relation (or set of link relations)
for
linking from snapshot to snapshot.
Do you now see what I'm talking about?
I understand what you're talking about, but I just don't see the
need. I would have expected a non-incremental feed to be a single
Atom document.
In the case of something like a top 10 feed, I'd imagine it would
be. But a search results feed like what's described above may not be.
My reason for wanting paging is so that a user doesn't need to
fetch data that he already has - this can never be a problem with a
non-incremental feed because it doesn't grow.
I'm not sure I understand--it's not as if a non-incremental feed were
simply a static document. They're resources whose contents are
replaced wholesale (with the things that were in the old set possibly
still being in the new set) rather than having their old contents
augmented when new things are added.
