On Oct 14, 2005, at 11:13 AM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
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 OpenSearch case mentioned by Thomas is what convinced me that
terms related to temporal ordering aren't appropriate (what a pity,
since "newer" and "older" are the perfect terms for time ordered
sequences of feed documents!)
"Previous" and "next" suffer from the fact that they could easily be
interpreted differently in different use cases. For example, for
OpenSearch results "pages", clearly "prev" points to the search
results that come up "on top" and "next" to the lower results. But in
a conventional syndication feed, "next" could easily be taken to mean
either "the next batch of entries as you track back towards the
beginning of time from where you started (which is usually going to
be the growing end of the feed)", or "a batch of entries containing
the entries that were published next after the ones in this batch."
I'd have to look at the document to remind myself of which "next"
means, because either makes just as much sense to me.
Which brings me back to "top", "bottom", "up" and "down". In the
OpenSearch case, it's clear which end the "top" results are going to
be found. In the syndication feed case, the convention is to put the
most recent entries at the "top". If you think of a feed as a stack,
new entries are stacked on "top". The fact that these terms are less
generic and flexible than "previous" and "next" is both an advantage
and a disadvantage. I think the question is whether it's an
advantage in a significant majority of cases or not. What orderings
would those terms not work well for?
Antone
