This is very convincing to me.
Henry
On 4 Apr 2005, at 18:22, Antone Roundy wrote:
On Monday, April 4, 2005, at 09:43 AM, Robert Sayre wrote:I can't believe people want to put these out on the open Internet without an alternate.Feeds are the only kind of resource on the internet that I'm aware of that routinely have alternate representations. Thinking about it from that direction, why one WOULD want a feed to have an alternate representation becomes a more important question than would one WOULDN'T. Here are the reasons I can think of:
* Feeds emerged in the context of an internet where virtually everybody had a web browser, but virtually no one had a feed reader. Having only a feed severely limited one's reach.
* Feeds emerged in the context of an internet where publishers were already publishing HTML representations of the data they started putting into feeds.
* Feeds began as a method of announcing the existence of new data on web pages, not as a method of delivering full content.
* There are established and accepted methods of building revenue streams from web pages--ie, we know where to put ads in web pages. Until people figure out how to monetize their feeds, many will want to use them to drive people to their web pages.
It seems to me that the reasons for having alternate links in feeds are almost entirely based on the context in which feeds originally emerged. These conditions still apply to many feeds, but not all. I don't see any reason to try to force feeds to continue to be the unusual internet resource that always has an alternate representation.
Antone
