Comment entries are titled with "on <post title>". Which means that, even in the feed, it is easy to know which entry is being commented. That basically destroys the complaint you have about feeds #2 and #4.
I believe that you are completely forgetting that an Atom feed does not exist by itself - its primary purpose is to be consumed by a program (generally a feed aggregator). In that context, here are usecases that I have for each of Habari's default feeds. > 1. Page/slugs (<site>/atom/<pagenum>) No need to explain. > 2. All comments (<site>/atom/comments) - I am the site owner, and I want to know when one of the posts is commentated - I could even have software that pings me automatically when a feed is updated - in which case, having posts in feed#2 would be an inconvenience. And because every comment title in the Atom feed bears the post's title, I always know for which post the comment was. - I add it to feed#1 and I now have both posts and comments in my aggregator. Because the posts and comments are in separate feeds, I can organize each of them in different folders (when I see 1000+ new entries in my aggregator, I can see that 950 of them are comments and not panic) > 3. A single entry (<site>/<slug>/atom) If I have not subscribed to feed#1, I may want to subscribe to feed#3 so that I have it in my feed aggregator, and I can either keep it alone (I'm on Google Reader, so the articles that are on my Google Reader constitute a kind of Blogs archive for me), or I can put feed#4 in my aggregator at the same time. While that feed is the one whose utility is most debatable, it is in fact required if you are to have a coherent offer. > 4. A single entry's comments (<site>/<slug>/atom/comments) I add it to either feed#1 or feed#3 and I have all comments about a precise blog post in my aggregator - I let the other feed (either 1 or 3) have the corresponding blog entry. In addition to lack of flexibility, I see an enormous downside with your feeds (feed#1+2, feed#3+4), that would prevent me from ever using them: If there are too many comments, the post entries will be pushed out of feed#1+2 much sooner than when feed#1 is alone - it will be easy for an aggregator to miss your entries because people made many comments. By keeping the feed#1 separate, I insure that, at least, even if many people comment very quickly, they should still get all of my blog entries (they may miss comments though). And in feed#3+4, unless you're willing to keep the entry and an unlimited number of comments, the entry will eventually be pushed out - something that cannot happen if you keep feed#3 separate. In short, the small convenience that such feeds bring (I don't have to subscribe to two feeds if I want to have it and its comments on my feed aggregator) does not make up for the inherent drawbacks. Now that I think of it, the drawbacks are so big that I would not be in favor of putting them as possible feed options in Habari's default feed plugin. It looks like a neat idea at first, and only later does one realize that it is a trap. -- Jean Hominal -- To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/habari-users
