Subject: Re: PaceLinkReflection - Close it

From: Randy Charles Morin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 04:39:37 -0700 (PDT)

Asbjorn write:
>But SHOULD just says SHOULD.
Agreed. Keep it. 
 
Tim, please reword to your liking.
Thanks,
 
Randy

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From: Tim Bray <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 07:06:31 -0700

> Tim, please reword to your liking.

No.  It is entirely silly to say that because I set up a screen-scraper 
feed today pointing at kbcafe or the New York Times or the NSA, that 
they have any obligation in the world, no matter how slight, to point 
to me.  There is no case whatsoever for a SHOULD, this whole idea is 
just wrong. -Tim

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From: Randy Charles Morin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 07:16:31 -0700 (PDT)

Tim, 
Nobody is saying that. But, if you could setup that feed for kbcafe anyway, I could really use the extra bandwidth ;)
 
I think there's a lot of value in encouraging reflection. It allows my browser [1] to automagically do some cool stuff in the background, w/out requiring me to cut and paste URLs or make assumptions about feed equivalence, etc. One of the reason we are doing Atom is because RSS 2.0 wasn't tight enough. Why would be loose about feed reflection and equivalence?
MHO and thanks for taking up my Paces, I really thought they were dead,
 
Randy
http://www.kbcafe.com
 
[1] - http://www.kbcafe.com/juice/

Tim Bray <[email-masked]> wrote:

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From: Tim Bray <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 07:24:09 -0700

On Jul 30, 2004, at 7:16 AM, Randy Charles Morin wrote:

>  Nobody is saying that.

Yes, that's exactly what the Pace says.  It says that if there's an 
atom feed with <atom:link rel="alternate"> anywhere in the universe, 
authored by anybody, accurate or not, friendly or not, pointing at some 
HTML page, than that HTML page SHOULD point back at the atom feed.  
Which I think is entirely unreasonable.

> I think there's a lot of value in encouraging reflection.

There's a lot of value in feed autodiscovery, thus the discussion 
around MarkP's RFC.  But the decision as to which feed is 
autodiscovered out of some HTML is entirely up to the author of the 
HTML.  You would be silly not to use autodiscovery if you were able and 
you had a feed you wanted to promote.  But you have no obligation 
("SHOULD") whatever. -Tim

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From: Randy Charles Morin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 07:37:26 -0700 (PDT)

What if I included context like this...
 
Where the feed and Web page are published together, the feed should point to the Web page and the Web page to the feed.
 
We can work on exact wording later, just an idea for now.
Thanks,
 
Randy
http://www.kbcafe.com

atom feed with anywhere in the universe, 

		
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From: Sam Ruby <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 10:59:58 -0400

Tim Bray wrote:
> There's a lot of value in feed autodiscovery, thus the discussion around 
> MarkP's RFC.  But the decision as to which feed is autodiscovered out of 
> some HTML is entirely up to the author of the HTML.  You would be silly 
> not to use autodiscovery if you were able and you had a feed you wanted 
> to promote.  But you have no obligation ("SHOULD") whatever. -Tim

There is a lot of value in ETAGS, but the word is not getting out to 
everywhere it SHOULD.  This is an optional feature of HTTP, one that is 
crucial to the use case of feeds.

In this case, there is a lot of information out there on the internet on 
this topic.  Some of it is quite good, others are vague, contradictory, 
and none of it is authoritative.

I'm not sure how best to solve this problem, but putting a SHOULD in the 
document is the best solution I've seen to date.

For reference, here is the definition of SHOULD in RFC 2119:

    SHOULD   This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
    may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
    particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
    carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

Even though there doesn't appear that RFC 2119 treats SHOULD any 
different than RECOMMENDED, is there a difference in connotation that 
would help here?

- Sam Ruby

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From: Tim Bray <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 08:31:42 -0700

On Jul 30, 2004, at 7:59 AM, Sam Ruby wrote:

>> HTML.  You would be silly not to use autodiscovery if you were able 
>> and you had a feed you wanted to promote.  But you have no obligation 
...
> I'm not sure how best to solve this problem, but putting a SHOULD in 
> the document is the best solution I've seen to date.

OK, but someone has to come up with language to make it clear that this 
is a recommended good practice only in the case where the publisher 
wants to direct traffic to the feed.  I am quite convinced that there 
will be lots of parasitic, "third voice", or "opposing viewpoints" 
feeds out there in the world, and the SHOULD clearly doesn't apply to 
them.   -Tim

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From: Sam Ruby <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 12:11:57 -0400

Tim Bray wrote:

> will be lots of parasitic, "third voice", or "opposing viewpoints" feeds 
> out there in the world, and the SHOULD clearly doesn't apply to them.   

Just thinking it through out loud.

Person X is controversial.  Person Y presents an alternative view.
X.atom has a <link rel="alternate" href="X.html"> in atom:head
Y.atom has a <link rel="alternate" href="Y.html"> in atom:head
Y.atom has a <a href="X.html"> in atom:content

What should the recommendations be?

X.html should have a <link rel="alternate" href="X.atom"> in html:head
Y.html should have a <link rel="alternate" href="Y.atom"> in html:head

Nothing more.  In particular, X has no obligation, however slight, to 
include any reference to Y.

If we can agree to that general concept, we can work on the wording. 
The pace said:

   the atom:feed element with type="alternate" points to an HTML page

Well, atom:feed elements don't have a type attribute.  And "points to" 
is a bit vague.  In the current draft, we are specifically talking about 
the URI contained in the atom:link element defined in section 4.2.2 
where the type is "text/html" or "application/xhtml+xml" and the 
rel="alternate".  The resource that that URI identifies SHOULD contain 
an autodiscovery link specifying this feed.

- Sam Ruby

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From: Sam Ruby <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 13:20:23 -0400

Sam Ruby wrote:

>>>> and you had a feed you wanted to promote.  But you have no 
>>>> obligation ("SHOULD") whatever. -Tim
>>
>>
>> ...
>>
>> OK, but someone has to come up with language to make it clear that 
>> this is a recommended good practice only in the case where the 
>> publisher wants to direct traffic to the feed.  I am quite convinced 
>> that there will be lots of parasitic, "third voice", or "opposing 
>> viewpoints" feeds out there in the world, and the SHOULD clearly 
>> doesn't apply to them.   
> 
> 
> If we can agree to that general concept, we can work on the wording. The 
> pace said:
> 

On further reflection, the last sentence should read:

The URI SHOULD identify a resource that contains an autodiscovery link 
specifying this feed.

Hopefully, this addresses Tim's concern.  Only people who produce feeds 
have a (weak) obligation.  And if they fail to meet that obligation, 
then it is their failing, not the producer of any other resource.

- Sam Ruby

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From: Antone Roundy <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 11:39:14 -0600

On Friday, July 30, 2004, at 09:31  AM, Tim Bray wrote:
> doesn't apply to them.   -Tim
>
This seems like something that should be in a best practices document.  
Anything stronger than "here's something you'll probably want to do if 
you control both the feed and its related website" just seems too 
strong.  And that kind of wording just seems more appropriate for best 
practices than the core spec. That's my opinion.

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From: Walter Underwood <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 10:46:03 -0700

> the document is the best solution I've seen to date.

Seems more like a MAY than a SHOULD to me. If you violate a SHOULD,
you can expect important features to not be available. It interoperates,
but with a loss of functionality.

This is a MAY, which adds additional, useful features which are
not core.

wunder
--
Walter Underwood
Principal Architect, Verity

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From: Tim Bray <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 10:47:51 -0700

On Jul 30, 2004, at 10:20 AM, Sam Ruby wrote:

>> In the current draft, we are specifically talking about the URI 
>> contained in the atom:link element defined in section 4.2.2 where the 
>> type is "text/html" or "application/xhtml+xml" and the 
>> rel="alternate".  The resource that that URI identifies SHOULD 
>> contain an autodiscovery link specifying this feed.
>

I still don't think such a statement is really much use, but this is a 
much clearer and better  statement and if people want it, I guess it's 
not actively harmful. -Tim

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From: Sam Ruby <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 14:10:56 -0400

> This is a MAY, which adds additional, useful features which are

Is autodiscovery an important feature?  If not, lets not pursue an RFC. 
  If so, let's identify where it MUST or SHOULD be used.

- Sam Ruby

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From: Asbjørn Ulsberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 20:44:28 +0200

On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 10:46:03 -0700, Walter Underwood <[email-masked]>  
wrote:

> Seems more like a MAY than a SHOULD to me.

What if the text was moved to a third Atom specification document  
alongside with Mark Pilgrim's autodiscovery mechanism? Would it be too  
much to mandate SHOULD then as well?

> This is a MAY, which adds additional, useful features which are

If this was moved to another specification, that whole specification would  
be «outside the core» and thus optional. I also feel that this belongs  
with the «Introspection and Discovery-services» more than with the format  
specification.

-- 
Asbjørn Ulsberg         -=|=-        [email-masked]
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»