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Re: PaceAllowDuplicateIDs
On 5 May 2005, at 17:53, Graham wrote:
On 5 May 2005, at 4:22 pm, Henry Story wrote:
If you don't want to keep a history of the entries all you need to
do is drop all but the
latest entry with the same id. There is nothing more to it. Just
show the user the last
one you came across.
But, if we follow Eric's model of how a wiki changelog should be
defined, I'll be missing entries in the log, because several
different entries have the same id. Ergo, the user interface and
data model for the new type of feed this proposal permits is very
different.
If your tool (Is it Shrook2? [1]) only shows people the latest
version available to you of
an entry, then by showing them only the latest version, Shrook2 will
be giving the user what
he is expecting.
When your news reader currently reads feeds on the internet what does
it do
with changed entries? Either it keeps the older version around, for
the user to browse, or it
does not. If your users don't mind you throwing away the older
versions of an entry, then
they won't mind you throwing away the older versions of the above
entries either. There is no
difference in the behavior between allowing changed entries across
feed documents and changed
entries inside a feed document. People who place two entries with the
same id inside a feed
document should be aware that tools like yours will have the behavior
they do, and that this is
ok.
Other people may be interested in looking at things historically.
They will get a historical
viewer and be happy with it.
I think the current proposal is good exactly because it allows the
wiki people to express
what they want to express correctly. Namely how their wiki entry is
changing over time.
This proposal permits this, and it does not harm anyone else.
It harms everyone, by allowing a second, unrelated data model in
Atom feeds. They may not be posting today, but I assure you, when
other aggregator authors get the first user complaints about how
Eric's wiki log displays incompletely in their program, they'll
forgive Dave Winer everything.
Again, has anyone yet complained to you that you have not kept a
historical and browse-able track
record of how the entries Shrook2 is looking at have changed over
time? Clearly they could,
as you sometimes let them know that an entry that they already have
read has been updated. They
could ask you what the changes were, no? How it changed, etc.
If your users don't care that much about the history of an entry,
then you can dump all but the
latest entry. Or you could just keep the last two entries, so that
you can show them a diff.
Graham
HJStory
http://bblfish.net/blog/
[1] http://www.fondantfancies.com/apps/shrook/