Folks, I hate to be insistent, however, I think that in the mail below I offered some pretty compelling reasons why lists should be entries rather than turning feeds into lists. Could someone please comment on this? Is there some point that I'm completely missing? What is wrong with my suggestion that lists-are-entries is much more useful than the alternative?
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bob Wyman Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2005 5:10 PM To: 'Mark Nottingham' Cc: atom-syntax@imc.org Subject: RE: "Top 10" and other lists should be entries, not feeds. Mark Nottingham wrote: >Are you saying that when/if Netflix switches over to Atom, they > shouldn't use it for the Queue? No. I'm saying that if Netflix switches over to Atom, what they should do is insert the Queue information, as a list, into a single entry within the feed. This will not only preserve the nature of Atom feeds as "feeds" but also allow NetFlix a number of new and potentially interesting opportunities for providing data to customers. Most important among these will be the ability to include multiple lists in the feed (i.e. in addition to the Queue, they could also include their "Top 10" list as well as a set of "recommendations" based on user experience. They might even include a list of "10 most recent transactions on your account") Each list would be a distinct entry. To make life easier on aggregators, each entry "type" should probably use the same atom:id across "versions." This allows the aggregators to discard earlier, now out of date entries. NetFlix would also be able to intermix information such as the "Queue List" with non-list entries. For instance, they might have a "Message from NetFlix" that they want to include in the feed or, they might include a series of movie reviews that were carefully selected for the specific user. Basically, by using entries for lists instead of converting the entire feed into a list, NetFlix is able to offer a much richer and much more satisfying experience to their users. The ability of Atom to carry both lists and non-lists as entries means that Atom is able to offer a much more flexible and powerful mechanism to NetFlix than can be had from the less-capable RSS V2.0 solution. I think that if I were NetFlix, I would want to have the opportunity to experiment with and find ways to exploit this powerful capability. The richer the opportunity for communications between NetFlix and their customers, the greater the opportunity they have to generate revenues. The alternative to using entries rather than feeds would be creating multiple feeds per user. That strikes me as a solution which is ugly on its face and unquestionably increases the complexity of the system for both NetFlix and its customers. The "list-in-entry" solution is much more elegant and much more powerful. bob wyman
