James Yenne wrote:
I'm led to believe there is some controversy here. James' description is
what I would expect, and seems straight-forward enough. Is there any
thing
more to this?
There are a couple of options for an aggregator author. They can mark an
entry as having changed when 1) the content of the entry has changed; 2) the
updated element has changed; 3) the updated element has changed as well as
the content having been changed; or 4) do nothing at all. I'm sure there are
other possibilities, but I think those are the main issues.
With option 1 the poor user is flooding with notifications for all sorts of
insignificant updates like single character spelling corrections. With
option 2 the user is even worse off because they get notified of changes to
an entry when in fact nothing at all in the content has changed (this is not
uncommon). Option 3 is probably the least annoying, but can still end up
flagging insignificant updates and can still miss significant updates if the
publisher forgets to set the updated element. Option 4, well, it's easy if
nothing else.
FWIW Snarfer does something based on option 3. Only changes to the actual
message content are considered important enough to notify the user of an
update. The title, author and other metadata aren't considered significant.
Changes to the HTML markup in the content aren't considered significant
either. Not perfect perhaps, but I think it strikes a fair balance between
being useful and being annoying.
Regards
James
