On 14/10/2005, at 9:22 AM, Lindsley Brett-ABL001 wrote:
I have a suggestion that may work. The issue of defining what is "prev" and "next" with respect to a time ordered sequence seems to be a problem. How about defining the link relationships in terms of time - such as "newer" and "older" or something like that. That way, the collection returned should be either "newer" (more recent updated time) or "older" (later updated time) with respect to the current collection doc.
A feed isn't necessarily a time-ordered sequence. Even a feed reconstructed using fh:prev (or a similar mechanism) could have its constituent parts generated on the fly, e.g., in response to a search query.
The ordering of the entries may not matter, but the ordering of the documents does. Starting with the active feed document, you need to know whether you should be following a series of "prev" links or "next" links in order to traverse the archives back through time. While your feed history spec used "prev" for that purpose, previous implementations of atom:link appear to have used "next".
I agree that it's important to honour the document order; that's what FH tries to do. I'm a little surprised to hear you say that people thought that this was previously 'next'; I'd never heard that (but will be happy to put a note in).
I was going to suggest that initially but I don't think it's strictly true. The spec says that "self" identifies a resource *equivalent* to the containing element. Considering that an archived document and the active feed document will quite likely have no entries in common I think it's a bit of a stretch to claim them equivalent. "Derived" would be a better relationship IMHO.
Hmm. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Actually, I think this is an opportunity -- we we define a new link relation to the subscription document, and specify that it can only occur in archive documents, it obviates the need for a separate fh:archive flag, which in turn means that you don't have to declare two namespaces to use fh in RSS archive documents -- which was one of the things making me reluctant to switch over to atom:link.
How about: <atom:link rel="subscription" href="..."/> ? -- Mark Nottingham http://www.mnot.net/
