Sylvain Hellegouarch wrote: > >> I have no idea what you mean by "not precise enough to be used". What >> makes them imprecise? > > The very fact they don't represent a state that can be trusted. As the > spec says they are not the true value but the true value at one given > time. >
The values are no more or less trustworthy than the link's own type, length, and hreflang attributes. I refer you to http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/mime-respect-20060412 >> Look at just about piece of blogging software that accepts comments and >> on the front page you'll typically see a link that specifies the number >> of comment received for that entry. It may, or may not be an accurate >> count, but it serves a useful purpose. Why is the same metadata not >> useful in an entry/feed? > > Well to take your example a bit further. Say I'm following comments posted > to an entry, since there is no way for me to decide if the number provided > by the extension is the most up-to-date, I will have to manually go to the > source itself and check if someone replied since my last visit. How is > that useful to me as an user? > If you need an exact count, go to the linked resource. Feed publishers should take steps to ensure that the count is accurate. Again, read the W3C Tag finding referenced above. > Besides you do not answer the question of HTTP caching I mentionned. > Basically it would break most planets out there which rely heavily on the > '304 Not Modified' status code to check if a feed has been modified. In > this case a server such as Apache would respond: "well yes the file has > changed on the disk so here it is" when in fact the content of the feed > has only changed for the number of comments of an entry. > HTTP provides a possible solution to this in the form of a weak entity tag. Also, Feed delta encoding could be leveraged to further mitigate the potential issues. > Clients could of course work around such issue but this is a rather big > problem to me. > I would suspect that you currently have the same problems with folks that use the highly popular slash:comments RSS extension. FTE is not introducing any new problems, nor is it seeking to fix existing problems in the feed syndication model. - James
