On Dec 6, 2006, at 12:14 PM, Jan Algermissen wrote:
Following a link is not the same thing as subscribing to something.
The act of subscribing is a local activity performed by the user
agent. What you do when you follow the link to a feed is a GET.
Your agent then decides if subscribing to that resource is a good
idea. To make that decision, the agent has to look at the
representation and the it is insignificant overhead to see if the
thing returnes <feed> or <entry>.
...
Maybe I want to monitor a single media resource; an Atom media
entry would be an ideal thing to do so (I'd rather look at the meta
data than at the media resource upon each poll).
I'd say: stick with the one media type that is currently there -
there is no problem, just misconception about what it means to
subscribe.
A few reasons why a user agent might want to be able to tell the
difference between a link to a feed and a link to an entry beforehand
is in order to:
1) be able to ignore the link to the entry (ie. not present it to the
user) if the user agent doesn't handle entry documents (rather than
presenting it as a "subscribe" link, only to have to say "sorry, it's
not a feed" after the user tries to subscribe).
2) be able to say "subscribe" to links to feeds, and "monitor" links
to entries (the user may not be interested in monitoring a single
entry for changes--if they can't tell that that's what the link is
for, they may end up needlessly doing so but think that they've added
another feed to their subscription list).
