On May 18, 2006, at 12:31 PM, A. Pagaltzis wrote:
Actually, you don’t really need another format. There’s no reason
why you couldn’t use atom:feed in place of your hypothetical
ct:comment-tracking. :-) Your ct:entry elements could almost be
atom:entry ones instead, too, except that assigning them titles
and IDs feels like overkill.
The point of the whole exercise is to create a lightweight document
for volatile metadata. If it's an atom:feed, you have to include a
lot of stuff that's not needed here--atom:title, atom:updated,
atom:author, and atom:summary or atom:content. Also, you'd need to
have an atom:id for each entry in addition to the @ref pointing to
the entry that it talks about.
The real cost is not the cost of an extra format, but that
implementations then need to understand the FTE in order to know
to poll an extra document to retrieve the out-of-band metadata.
Sure, but if they don't understand FTE, they wouldn't know what to do
with the extra metadata anyway even if it were in the main feed.
They MIGHT be able to do some generic processing of the comments
link, but the reliability of any generic processing algorithm for
unknown link types is questionable since we left atom:link open to
all sorts of uses. And you COULD keep the comments links in the main
feed but just leave off @count and @when for the benefit of apps that
don't process the sibling document.
On May 18, 2006, at 11:48 AM, Antone Roundy wrote:
This approach could be generalized to enable offloading of other
metadata that's more volatile than the entries themselves.
I don't know yet what other metadata might be handled this way, but
here's slightly revised pseudo-XML that makes it more general and
adds a few useful things:
<feed ...>
<id>foobar</id>
...
<link rel="volatile" href="..." />
...
<entry>
<id>foo</id>
...
</entry>
<entry>
<id>bar</td>
...
</entry>
...
</feed>
<v:volatile ref="foobar" xmlns:v="..." xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/
Atom" xmlns:thr="..."><!-- @ref could be omitted if using with RSS -->
<link rel="related" href="URL of the feed" ... /><!-- don't really
need something different from "related", right? -->
<updated>...</updated>
<v:entry ref="foo"><!-- @ref could be a guid if using with an RSS
2.0 feed, though we all know that RSS 2.0 guids are misused in ways
that might make the connection unreliable -->
<updated>...</updated>
<link rel="comments" href="..." type="..." hreflang="..."
thr:count="5" thr:when="..." />
<link rel="comments" href="..." type="..." hreflang="..."
thr:count="3" thr:when="..." />
</v:entry>
<v:entry ref="bar">
<updated>...</updated>
<link rel="comments" href="..." type="..." hreflang="..."
thr:count="0" thr:when="..." />
<link rel="comments" href="..." type="..." hreflang="..."
thr:count="1" thr:when="..." />
</v:entry>
...
</v:volatile>
