Danny Ayers wrote:
> The killer problem of using doc order is that the feed data *will*
> be aggregated and republished.
Precisely! As the blogosphere grows and as the number of feeds grow,
I feel it is inevitable that we are simply going to have to give up the
current "feed-oriented" focus and concentrate more on the entries. Ie: "It's
about the Entries, Stupid!".
We're seeing the same pattern in "blogs" that we saw with web sites.
In the old days, you maintained a list of known web sites and scanned them
on a regular basis. This was augmented by surfing (i.e. "manual RDF...").
However, today, there is simply too much information and too many sites for
us all to rely on "favorites" lists and bookmarks. Thus, Google has become
the tool for navigating between sites. What we look for today is not "sites"
but rather "pages." While today, the blogosphere is largely focused on the
discussion of "blogs" and "feeds", I feel that in the future, we'll see a
growing focus on entries...
Web site designers have, in many cases, already begun to learn the
new design disciplines that focus on a page in isolation instead of the
"site-oriented" disciplines that were popular in the 90's and relied on
carefully planned navigation paths through a site. Today's web designer must
recognize that "deep pages" are accessed directly -- not by navigating a
path from the "home page." Similarly, while today's feed developers think
they can rely on presenting an entry within the context of other entries --
which relies on their entire feed being experienced or read, in the future,
feed developers will come to realize that it is NOT their feeds that are
read by people, rather it is the entries that get read. Thus, any
relationship between entries must be contained within the entry -- it can't
rely on position within feed or other contextual clues that require
entry-external data. As Danny says: "Far better to declare the information
in the data (like the date) and let the client (or intermediary) sort
according to the user's requirements."
To allow document order to be significant compromises the utility of
aggregation and search mechanisms. This should not be tolerated.
bob wyman
