Re: The distinction between "time this entry was published" and"time this entry was added to this feed"

["James Holderness" <j4_james@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Martin Atkins wrote:
> If I'm understanding you correctly, then in the common case of a polling 
> aggregator the order is skewed unless polling is done very often.
>
> Sorting by published time allows items from multiple feeds to be 
> intermingled into a single list in the correct order.

Feed readers typically poll every hour. If I receive 20 new posts in that 
hour, I couldn't care less what exact order I read them in - I just want to 
know that those are the most recent 20 posts.

I know that for some people, some kind of date order (what you refer to as 
the "correct" order) is important. So if article A has a publish date, or 
update date, or whatever that is 10 minutes before article B, then it's 
vitally important that message A gets read before message B, or is it 
message B before message A? I just don't get why it's so important.

I bet if you asked, most users couldn't even tell you if they were ordering 
by published date or updated date. They just know that how they're doing it 
is correct; and vitally important. Right up until the time that it's 
inconvenient to have things sorted that way; and then it's the date that is 
wrong, not the ordering.

The thing is, if you know that the actual ordering doesn't matter, and it's 
more a matter of perception than anything else, it's not that difficult to 
come up with an algorithm that gives the perception of sorting by date 
without actually doing so.

Regards
James