Subject: PaceDuplicateIds and archive formats

From: Henry Story <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 May 2005 19:20:51 +0200

I have just had a wicked thought regarding PaceDuplicateIds.

One of the main motives, as I understand it, against PaceDuplicateIds  
is that
this does not allow one to know what the current state of the Entry  
is. I don't
think that not allowing duplicate entries with the same id is the  
solution to the
problem. The best solution to the problem is simply not to put any  
content at all in feed,
but to point to a web resource that does. Since you can always only  
retrieve a web resource
in the present, you can only get the latest of such an entry.  
Furthermore this would
be a lot more restful, and dramatically reduce the size of downloads,  
using all the resources
of the web, caches and all, the way they are meant to be used.

A feed would then look something like this:

<feed xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#draft-ietf-atompub-format-08">
   <title>Example Feed</title>
   <link href="http://example.org/"/>
   <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
   <author>
     <name>John Doe</name>
   </author>

   <entry src="/blog/2005/19/02/entry1.atom">
     <id>urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a</id>
     <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
   </entry>

   <entry src="/blog/2005/19/02/entry2.atom">
     <id>urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6b</id>
     <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
   </entry>
</feed>

The more content appears in an entry found in a feed, the more it  
turns into an
archive format. Perhaps this is where some of the disagreements or  
misunderstandings
are stemming from.

Henry Story
http://bblfish.net/blog/