Sean Lyndersay wrote:
> Thanks James,
>
>There's a general comment about normalization that I should address. First,
>normalization
>is something we have to do -- every aggregator on the planet has a native
>format that they
>work with, and they convert to that format before doing anything else. In our
>case, since
>we're developing a platform as well, we make that normalized format
available to any user
>of the platform. We also provide a object model over the normalized feed.
>
Yep, completely understood, but it's still rather annoying that I can't
seem to be able to get to the original input... or at the very least,
have an option of retrieving the XML as Atom if the original input was
Atom... if not by default, then as an additional API call.
If the MS RSS stuff was *just* an aggregator, I wouldn't care so much
about this, but given that it's also a platform, I, as a publisher,
don't take too kindly to that platform completely changing and hiding
what I originally published from developers.
> Giving the original format to the developer is of questionable value since
> that makes the
> developer have to do all the work of learning 4 different feed formats just
> to get the data
>they need. For this reason, we kept the normalized format as close the most
>commonly used format
Like I said, providing the normalized form is a reasonable default
behavior, but for those sick and twisted individuals that want to get to
the original format, you should let them.
> Obviously, we have some bugs still, as you've pointed out, which we'll
> address for the next Beta.
>
:-D
> I'm sure that many people -- on this list in particular -- think that the
> right thing to do is
> to normalize to Atom 1.0, instead.
I would have preferred that, but I can understand the choice y'all made.
> #1. We make no active effort to re-order the items in the feed. By default,
> they should end
> up being ordered by the date elements in the feed. As you noted, neither Atom
> nor RSS 2.0/1.0 require that order be respected.
>
Would it be reasonable to make sure that it sorts 'em in descending
order by date? :-)
> #2. Stripping out extensions. This is a bug we'll address.
>
> #3. Invalid Atom. This is a bug we'll address.
>
> #4. We'll look into addressing this with a namespace.
>
Excellent.
>
> Thanks for the detailed post and comments. If you have any other questions,
> just let me know.
I'll likely be hitting the API again in the next couple of weeks. In
the meantime, please make sure y'all are taking a look at the
conformance tests on the Atom wiki. :-)
- James
