On 5 Feb 2005, at 11:20, David Powell wrote:
This specification assigns no significance to the order of atom:entry elements within an Atom Feed Document. Atom Processors MAY present entries in any order, unless a specific ordering is required by an extension.
Given a model of only informative metadata extensions this wouldn't be valid, unless the spec said that the order was significant, then it would be acceptable to communcate a preferred display order using extensions.
The question is basically, if I have a database does it need to preserve the sequence number of the entry within a document?
You put this in terms of databases and I put the question in terms of graphs (which if you
have an rdf database to store your triples comes to the same thing).
And my feeling is here that we should not have to keep the sequence numbers of the
order of the entries in the document.
Perhaps this is what Roy Fielding is getting at when he speaks of there being confusion
on this list between the data model and the interaction model. It is important for
clients when they ask for a sequence of entries to know what the order those entries
are coming in. This can save them a lot of processing time. But it should not be part
of the syntax to specify a preferred order of the entries.
Display order is a different matter, but for the option of lexical order, then the answer would need to be yes, but I don't think it would be worth it.
Display order on the client will also completely depend on what the client is trying to
do. If the client is just interested in archiving all the entries, then any new feed
be it an old one or a new one will be of interest: it will just be added to the database.
If the client is interested in displaying the changes in a gui, this again may be completely up to the user. Some users may want only to see entries that they have read
that have changed, as this may show a change of position of interest to them.
Henry Story
-- Dave
