atom:provenance in the AtomAPI (was: It's about the Entries, Stupid!)

[Robert Sayre <mint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/12/04 1:25 PM, "Bob Wyman" <bob@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Indexing ³Feeds² is conceptually the same as indexing a ³web
> server² rather then its web pages.

It's very similar to indexing the default view of a folder in Apache, or the
HTML representation of a WebDAV collection. Not useless, but not a good
place to stop crawling.

> This isn¹t just some abstract, conceptual
> nonsense, it actually relates to the origins of RSS as a format for ³Rich Site
> Summary². The intent was to produce a set of summaries that stood as proxies
> or replacements for the actual web pages or parts of web pages on a site. Just
> as the web pages themselves have distinct identity, so should the rss:items or
> atom:entries that are or will be used as alternatives to them.

I was looking over Six Apart's AtomAPI implementation[1], and I noticed that
they reject[2] Atom POSTs containing dc:subject elements which don't
correspond to a "category" configured in Movable Type. It seems to me that
dc:subject is being used as shorthand for which feeds and index pages an
entry will appear in.

I think atom:provenance could be useful when POSTing or PUTting an entry.
Why not just identify the feeds the entry should appear in by URI?

Identifying where an entry came from does not seem so different from
identifying where an entry should go.

Robert Sayre

P.S. I don't think this calls for a general purpose graph serialization
syntax :)

1.) http://www.mt-plugins.org/mtype/lib/MT/AtomServer.pm ("sub new_post")
2.) MT rejects it with status code 400. Maybe they should use 409 instead.