James Snell wrote:
> The <retracted /> element would be used within an entry to indicate that
> the entry has been retracted.
I must admit that I find myself going around in circles concerning
this issue of retractions. I may be overly analyzing this. In any case, the
following is my current thinking (subject to change...)
An Atom feed is a record of a stream of entries that have been
published over time. Once a thing is published, that fact cannot be erased,
retracted, etc. While you can't erase a message previously published, you
can make it unavailable by removing it from the current feed and you can
supercede previously read copies of the entry by publishing a new entry that
shares the same atom:id as the original.
I think <retract/> would only make sense if there was some semantic
associated with <retract/> that wasn't implied by republishing the entry. I
can't think of any useful semantics that replacement doesn't provide.
There is, however, one problem that bothers me a bit... Atom
requires that an entry has a "rel='alternate'" link. However, when I'm
trying to remove something (such as an erroneous earthquake report), I want
to delete any HTML pages that might have been created for the deleted event.
Once something is deleted, I can see that I need to communicate that fact in
the feed, however, it doesn't seem right that I should have to clutter my
site with all sorts of dead pages... Or, should I just have the retracting
entry point to a standard "Entry Retracted" page that is shared by all
retracted entries? (i.e. http://example.com/no_such_page.html )
bob wyman
