On Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 05:32:08PM +0100,
A. Pagaltzis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
a message of 37 lines which said:
> I don???t think it???s controversy, so much as that most people
> apparently simply don???t care whether an entry they???ve already
> seen has changed.
It is also may be because feed writers are too eager to set <updated>
when the change is insignificant (for instance, when there is simply a
reformatting). In Atom, the specification is, IMHO, very clear:
RFC 4287, 4.2.15. The "atom:updated" Element
The "atom:updated" element is a Date construct indicating the most
recent instant in time when an entry or feed was modified in a way
the publisher considers significant. Therefore, not all
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
modifications necessarily result in a changed atom:updated value.
But it is much more muddy in the RSS world which may explain why feed
reader programmers tend to ignore <updated>.
Developing best practices in this area is complicated because there is
a strong interaction between the feed writers and the reader software.
PS: Wikipedia allow authors to check a box "Minor update" when they
modify a page and they don't want it to be regarded as a significant
change. I wonder how many authors set it. It would be a nice Usability
study to examine that.
