Meta-pubs again

[Tim Bray <Tim.Bray@xxxxxxx>]

Back in January, I posted about the idea of a "meta-publication",  
something you can do CRUD on publications or collections.  mod_atom  
needs something like this.   Interestingly, several people wrote back  
and said yes, but there was disagreement on the mechanics.  Here some  
of the plausible options that happen when you POST to a meta-pub:

- create a new collection in the same workspace
- create a new workspace in the same service doc with one or more  
collections
- create a new service doc with one or more workspaces with one or  
more collections

The reason I'm raising this again is that I'm going to enhance the Ape  
to test my own implementation (doesn't matter that much which of the  
above it does) and since this isn't standardized, I guess I'll be  
doing that in a private fork.  If there were sufficient experience and  
appetite to standardize these semantics, well then, I'd be able to  
just enhance the Ape.

One could also think of emulating SQL culture: the ISO SQL committee,  
whenever it was faced with a choice between two options, usually  
adopted both.  You could imagine a new attribute atom:feed@app:meta

<atom:feed app:meta="collection|workspace|service">

depending on which of the above the server would respond to a POST with.

I'm unconvinced at the moment that we're ready to plunge down the  
standardization path, but I thought it would be polite to ask.

 -Tim