On Wednesday, July 13, 2005, at 12:25 AM, A. Pagaltzis wrote:
Another might be that the aggregator asks the user on
subscription whether he/she also wants to poll the comment feed,
There's an implementation detail that should be pointed out, in case it
might influence the language ultimately chosen to define this feature.
Consider a real world example: I'm subscribed to Slashdot's feed. If
they had a comments feed for each story, I would NOT want to subscribe
to all of them...in fact, with Slashdot's volume, I'd never want to
subscribe to comments, even if they had a separate feed for each entry.
Okay, bad example.
Imagine a hypothetical feed with low enough volume that one might wish
to subscribe to the comments on some of the main entries, but enough
volume that one might not wish to subscribe to all comments. Deciding
whether to subscribe to comments at the feed level would not be
sufficient granularity. The user might want the option to subscribe to
comments on an entry-by-entry basis. If all of the comments are in a
single comments feed, then an application supporting this would need to
be able to track which threads within that feed the user had expressed
the wish to see. I'm not saying that's a bad idea--a feed that
occasionally gets a comment or two on one of its entries would likely
want to use a one comments feed for all entries approach--just pointing
it out. In fact, an application that could do that could go a step
further and allow the user to stop following specific threads within
the comments for a particular entry.
So here are the options a user might need:
Application level:
* Don't subscribe to all comments feeds (default)
* Subscribe to all comments feeds (DANGER! Beware of things that go
bump in the night!)
Feed level:
* Don't subscribe to all comments in this feed (default)
* Subscribe to all comments in this feed
Entry level:
* Don't subscribe to comments on this entry (default)
* Subscribe to comments on this entry
Comment level:
* Show this thread (default)
* Don't show anything more in this thread
Turning a higher level option on turns lower ones on, but shouldn't
take away the ability to turn them off.
