RE: Approach to atompub implementation for a forum

["Brian Smith" <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Eric Scheid wrote:
> On 12/12/07 6:26 PM, "A. Pagaltzis" <pagaltzis@xxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > * Eric Scheid <eric.scheid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2007-12-12 07:35]:
> >> each entry containing a link to a service document for that topic.

How would the client choose a collection from the service document (when
there is more than one)? It is better to just link directly to the
collection.

> > Operating this correctly requires a client that expects to 
> > see service doc links in entries, and to understand what
> > these collections mean.
> 
> Does the client know what to do if handed a resource of a 
> particular content type? My web browser hands any 
> application/xml+atom resources to my feed reader, and my feed 
> reader offers to subscribe any such resources. I can also 
> hand text/html resources to my feed reader and it simply 
> displays the page. I would hope that if I hand it a workspace 
> resource it would offer to the sensible thing (eg. pass it 
> across to MarsEdit?)

I would rather have my email/messaging client handle the link, not
MarseEdit. That means that dispatching based on the type of the link is
not sufficient--the client needs to dispatch on the link relation, not
the type.

> > Oh yeah, and all schemes that involve collection-per-thread 
> > imply that following N threads requires polling N collections.
> > In contrast, if you just rely on RFC 4685 for threading, you can
> > stick as much or as little data as you want into any particular
> > feed. The most natural model is one feed per forum; this puts a
> > reasonable limit on the likely number of subscriptions per client
> > while at the same time limiting the amount of data in any one
> > feed to a likely reasonable volume. So following the most
> > obvious approach gives you something that works well.
> 
> There's one set of forums I follow where there are about a 
> hundred forums, and each forum has about a hundred new 
> articles posted daily, and some of those articles have 
> hundreds of comments posted (and some a relatively few 
> comments but are nonetheless particularly interesting). Do 
> the math and explain why I want to download all the articles 
> and thousands of comments for one forum when I'm only 
> interested in some of the articles. Another nice effect of 
> subscribing to particular articles is that it's also a form 
> of bookmarking that article.

One-feed-per-forum and one-feed-per-article/thread are both not
scalable. It would be better for each site to let the build a custom
aggregated feed from all the threads that he is interested in.

- Brian