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 the entry has been retracted.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