* Phil Ringnalda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2006-01-19 22:30]: >> I am trying to think of a scenario where I'd want to >> autodiscover an entry document (as opposed to simply linking >> to it) and the inability to distinguish between feed and entry >> documents is causing a problem, but I can't come up with >> anything. Can you provide an example? > >I have a weblog post. I would like aggregators to discover both >the feed for comments (rel="alternate feed") and the feed for my >weblog (rel="feed"),
Is `feed` a relationship of the page with the feed? Is there a reason `<a type="application/atom+xml">` wouldn’t suffice? >but I would like search engines and hypothetical Atom-aware >browsers and Piggybank-style history miners to discover the Atom >Entry document, where they can find just the entry for one-time >fetching with no question about what they are getting >(rel="alternate"). Okay, so you have two alternates: one with comments, one without. That would be `rel="alternate"` in both cases, with `title="Entry"` in one of them and `title="Entry with comments"` in the other. This is semantically weak, I know. But I don’t see how it can be strengthened. It merely appears to be expressible more precisely because we’re sticking to the weblog use case. What about feeds for a page on a wiki? Say you have one entry document which contains the latest version of the page at the time of retrieval, one feed which lists the history of major edits, one which lists major+minor edits, and let’s say it’s one of those newfangled wikis where you can leave comments on a page separately from the page content, so you have a feed for that as well. How do you tell those apart? Then someone comes around and does this on his site: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-atomwas/ And then someone else does something else. And someone else still uses Atom in yet another clever way. It’s just impossible to specify enough precise semantics to cover everyone’s use cases, and no single app will ever understand all of these disparate semantics. The problem seems simple while you look at it with blog-coloured glasses because that is such a small and well-understood niche of the problem space. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
