James Holderness wrote:
Mark Nottingham wrote:
Our of curiosity, do you know of *any* client applications that
actually support feed paging?
I think most of the use cases for paging have to do with things like
GData, OpenSearch, etc -- i.e., query results. That sort of thing
isn't targetted at desktop aggregators AFAICT; it seems to be more
for machine->machine communication, or for browsing a result set.
Actually when I said "feed paging" I meant that as a general term,
i.e. feed history too.
As for machine->machine communication, if these feeds aren't meant for
desktop aggregators then does it really matter that they function
differently? You can describe one algorithm for use in
machine->machine communication and another for use by desktop
aggregators downloading "regular" feeds. Both can use the same link
relations because they should never come into contact with each other.
Having said that I still don't see how a machine->machine algorithm
for retrieving a paged feed can be different from your current feed
history algorithm and still be useful.
Our current "previous" links aren't permalinks; they're more like
OpenSearch indexes: http://example.org/feed.xml?start=50&len=10. So
clients can't usefully cache them the way they could, say,
http://example.org/feed.xml?month=may2006. We may well want to offer
both types of links, even in the same feed, to support different
traversals of the underlying resource(s).
One issue we have today is that we're compatible with neither OpenSearch
nor feed-history :(.
-John
