On 1 Dec 2005, at 17:50, Uche Ogbuji wrote:
On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 10:25 +0100, Henry Story wrote:
On 29 Nov 2005, at 00:31, Luke Arno wrote:
On 11/28/05, Ernest Prabhakar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Henry,
On Nov 23, 2005, at 3:22 AM, Henry Story wrote:
A few improvements of atom over directories is that our feed can
contain not just the current version of an entry, but all previous
versions as well, which I think I remember was a feature supported
by the vms file system.
Interesting. It reminds me of a thought I had a while ago:
would it
be possible to emulate 80% of WebDAV by using HTTP + Atom?
I think that is very much the idea. If you check what is going on on
the atom protocol group you will find that they are moving in that
direction
http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/
Hmm. I worry about such a land grab. I'd rather put muscle behind
WebDAV and be sure that Atom dovetails. I think that the similarities
should be used to ensure such dovetailing, rather than to seed a
competition between Atom and DAV.
I don't think this need be thought of as a landgrab.
For one it is probably a consequence of atom trying to do the
simplest thing possible. When you think about it, a file system or
directory hierarchy is probably one of the simplest things around. It
is not surprising that if you think about content and publishing
content you end up with something that is very very similar to what
we had before.
Secondly Atom is already finished. It can hardly be claimed that atom
(and all the RSS formats before it) tried to grab hold of something
unintentionally. 'Grabbing' involves a conscious act, an intention.
If you think of Atom as a mathematical structure which in some sense
it is (if you follow some of the work of the atom-owl group) then you
are closer to understanding the type of grabbing that is happening
here. It is just simply that there is a strong isomorphism between
these two structures [1]. You and me are very similar. We are both
human. And there is an isomorphism there too. But I never intended to
grab you :-)
Mentioning WebDav further reinforces the parallel with file systems
now that I think of it. If you look at the parallel between atom and
WebDav, and compare this with the parallel between a plain unix file
system and a metadata enabled one, we have a very illuminating
parallel. A plain file system is the simplest thing around pretty
much and as a result it is the most wide spread type of file system.
Atom and RSS follow a similar pattern. They are much more widely
available than WebDav implementations. WebDav on the other hand is
really very similar to the metadata enabled file systems such as the
one shipped with Apple's Tiger [2]. In WebDav you ask the file
directly for its properties using PROPGET; in Tiger you do that using
tools such as xattr.
% xattr --set name John file
% xattr --set color red file
% xattr --list file
file
color red
name John
So with this paralell in mind
Simple File System / Atom
Metadata File System / WebDav
it becomes possible to further see how there is no landgrab happening
at all. Notice that both normal file systems and metadata file
systems can coexist quite peacefully. In fact OSX allows you to copy
a file with metadata to a non metadata enabled file system without
trouble and without loosing your metadata. Furthermore I imagine it
would be quite possible to publish atom files to WEBDAV systems.
Certainly it would be interesting to look into these parallels further.
Henry Story
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphism
[2] http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/7
