Having started agreeing with the initial post, and having read more of the
thread I am now divided about what the best position is.
In some sense the order is of the entries should not matter. All the important
data to order the entries is in the entries themselves given by the modified date,
the creation date, ... So if we map a whole feed into an rdf graph nothing is
lost. We can use the data in the graph to sort our entries as we wish.
On the other hand an application reading a feed would expect the latest entries
to be at the head of the feed. This is very important at the protocol level, because
without this guarantee, a client that would like to present the latest version
of an entry would be forced to read the whole feed document and all feed documents
linked to it, in order to be able to correctly assess that the entry it has really is
the latest one.
I think imposing a fixed ordering is not very helpful. Services may pop up that
order entries in different ways depending on the interests of the receiver. But
perhaps there should be a way to specify what the order of the entries is, or
at least give a way to specify that the entries are ordered inverse chronlogically
by the modified date when they are. This may be a protocol issue, or it may just
be a matter of adding a special info to the feed to specify its ordering.
Henry Story http://bblfish.net/
On 4 Feb 2005, at 20:27, Walter Underwood wrote:
--On February 3, 2005 11:21:50 PM -0500 Bob Wyman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:David Powell wrote:It looks like this might have got lost accidently when the atom:head element was introduced. Previously Atom 0.3 said [1]:Ordering of the element children of atom:feed element MUST NOT be considered significant.+1. The order of entries in an Atom feed should NOT be significant. This is, I think, a very, very important point to make.
-1
Is this a joke? This is like saying that the order of the entries in my mailbox is not significant. Note that ordering a mailbox by date is not the same thing as its native order.
Feed order is the only way we have to show the publication order of items
in a feed. I just looked at all my subscriptions, and there is only one
where the order might not be relevant, a security test for RSS readers.
That is clearly not within Atom's charter, so it doesn't count.
wunder -- Walter Underwood Principal Architect, Verity
