Perhaps they can, but that wouldn't always be desirable. Consider this
scenario: Somebody writes a program that searches Google, scrapes the
HTML results, and publishes them as an Atom feed. My purpose in
subscribing to the feed is not to be alerted when a new webpage is added
to page 20 of Google's results, it's to be alerted whenever a new webpage
makes it onto page 1. So I don't want new pages added to the live end of
the feed--I just want whatever is currently in the top 10 results, and my
feed reader will tell me when one of them is one it hasn't seen before.
Ok. That's a valid point, but I still wouldn't be particularly interested in
trying to accomodate that scenario. First you have someone producing a feed
that is almost impossible to use as designed. Second you have someone using
said feed contrary to how it was designed (although understandably so).
A more sensible approach would be a single feed document containing the top
N results (where N is manageable in size). You could subscribe to that as a
non-incremental feed and you would know at any point in time which were the
top 10 results. There is no real need for paging other than as a form of
snapshot history (i.e. what were the top 10 results last week).
Given the above scenario, why wouldn't you be able to subscribe to them?
I can understand why you might want to subscribe to such a feed (or at least
the first page of one). I can't understand why someone would want to create
it though. And I wouldn't be particularly concerned if it wasn't possible
for them to do such a thing.
My reason for wanting paging is so that a user doesn't need to fetch
data that he already has - this can never be a problem with a
non-incremental feed because it doesn't grow.
I'm not sure I understand--it's not as if a non-incremental feed were
simply a static document. They're resources whose contents are replaced
wholesale (with the things that were in the old set possibly still being
in the new set) rather than having their old contents augmented when new
things are added.
Exactly. The *entire document* is replaced. If you want to download an
update you have to redownload the whole thing. There's no point in having a
paging system since you can't stop after page 1. If you have to retrieve
every single page every single time then they might as well all be in one
page.
Once again, I have to ask the same question I asked Thomas: do you have a
problem with Mark's next/prev proposal as it stands, or are you just arguing
with me because you think I'm wrong? If the latter, feel free to just ignore
me. We can agree to disagree. Unless we're discussing a particular proposal
I don't see the point.
Regards
James
