Graham wrote:
On 7 Apr 2005, at 7:48 pm, Bob Wyman wrote:
Of course, the side effect of this change is that any aggregator
that uses an MD5-like approach to detect changes will now think that an
entry has been updated every time a new comment is made. This may or may not
be what is desired by consumers of feeds... In any case, there are now
millions of blogs whose entries are changed every time anyone comments on
them. Should aggregators ignore changes that are limited to the
"slash:comments" element? If so, are there other elements that should be
ignored?
Not that I have any data, but I don't seriously believe any aggregator that uses the content hash approach would survive very long in the market place without being buried under user complaints. Most (the one's I know of) either use identifiers or failing that some subset of the elements. Shrook uses an adaptive subset that means that if one element is unreliable it uses the others.
Mozilla Thunderbird's approach will be similar when the relevant bugs are closed.
Robert Sayre
