* James M Snell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005-07-13 06:40]: > >Maybe “companion?” I don’t know if I like that term, but it’s > >the best single-word description I can think of off the top of > >my head. >> > I think we could just as easily attach the "you really should > auto-subscribe" semantic to @rel="related" > @type="application/atom+xml" without incurring any need for > coming up with a new link type.
That hinges on our respective interpretations of “related.” Is it expected that feeds will link to “related” feeds which are *not* tightly associated with the feed in question? Does there need to be a way for them to do that? If so, then it follows that “related” is the wrong vehicle for this purpose. My opinion is yes, and yes, and hence that is is the wrong vehicle, which leads me to argue for another relationship type. > On a conceptual level more-specific is better, but on a > practical level, a new @rel label doesn't seem to buy us enough > benefit to justify requiring developers to implement support > for it. @rel="related" feeds can simply be handled differently > than other @rel="related" stuff. Hmm. The argument is good, but the premise mistaken. Developers will first and foremost have to support the concept of “highly relevant related feed that should probably be polled in addition.” It doesn’t matter what relationship type that’s tied to – it’s implementing the behaviour that takes the bulk of the work. And this behaviour is not in the core spec to begin with, so an implementor who has chosen to implement it has done so consciously enough that they will know about a new relationship type required for it, and will not be deterred by it. The choice of relationship to tie this behaviour to is but a trivial detail that boils down to comparing to a different string literal in one or at best three or four locations in the codebase. Special-casing [EMAIL PROTECTED]'related' and @type='application/atom+xml'] does not seem to be any simpler to implement than keeping an eye out for @rel='companion'. So by all I can tell, overloading “related” for this purpose only muddies the waters semantically such that loosely related extraneous feeds cannot be distinguished from highly relevant ones – without offering any actaul simplicity at all in return. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
