On 18/10/05 2:04 AM, "Antone Roundy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> I'd prefer that our use of 'prev' and 'next' be consistent with other uses
>> elsewhere, where 'next' traverses from the current position to the one that
>> *follows*, whether in time or logical order. Consider the use of
>> 'first/next/prev/last' with chapters or sections rendered in HTML.
>>
> ...so do you follow forward through time or backward? Is the starting
> "current position" "now" or the "the beginning of time"? Especially if we're
> talking about history, following backward makes as much sense as following
> forward.
You can "start" wherever you want, but the @rel='first' archive is the
archive which contains the first entry that ever existed. Why would the
@rel='first' archive contain the last entry created, that makes no sense.
If you want to go backwards in time, then the "next" archive would be found
by following the @rel='prev' link .. because you are going backwards!
> I prefer "next" to go back in time (if temporally ordered--from the most
> current chunk to the next most current chunk) or to less significant pages
> (in things like search results). But I'll probably have to stop and think
> what "next" means in temporally ordered feeds from time to time since it'd be
> the reverse of temporal order.
You're also likely to get confused when comparing Atom archives against
their HTML versions ... because in the HTML world the '@rel=first' page is
conventionally the oldest page, and the @rel='next' page traverses forward
in time.
> But what's "first"? It'd be the top results in a search feed, but
> would it be the start of time or the start from the present (before
> possibly travelling backward through time) in a temporally ordered
> feed? Making it the start of time would prevent it from matching up
> well with how significance ordered feeds match up (ie. does start
> point to the thing you'd most likely want to see if you subscribed to
> the feed?) If we're not careful, we'll be traversing out of "first"
> through "prev" and "last" through "next"!
Ask yourself these questions: which is the "first" message in this thread,
and if you wanted to understand the thread would you start there, or at the
most recent entry in this thread and read backwards. Remember that by the
time you've read back to the initial posting there would likely now be even
more entries into this thread, so where would you then read them from ...
where you started and going forward in time, or would you jump to the most
recent and then read backwards until you hit a message you already read?
So, would you read the messages in this order:
7,6,5,4,3,2,1,8,9,10,11,12,13,14
or...
7,6,5,4,3,2,1,11,10,9,8,13,12,14
or...
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14
I know which way I'd prefer to read stuff.
e.
