Subject: Arr! Avast me hearties!

From: Eric Scheid <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 03:31:01 +1000

Tis be gettin' t' th' time o' year when pirates be stalking th' deck. Arrr!

(I can't keep that up...)

there's a serious point ... I've just had the dubious pleasure of seeing a
couple of subscriptions have all their entries marked as changed/unread, and
on inspection I see they've flipped the magic switch and all their content
is now appearing in Pirate Speak (via the magic of output filters, and
barrels of rum).

This includes messages posted before official pirate day.

Sometime in the near future I expect they'll sober up, see the day has
passed, and unflip the magic Pirate Speak switch.

And all the subscriptions will again be presented in teh orginal spellig
wonder.

So ... ObAtom ... would recommended practice be to emit the garbled
enunciations inline, with no change to atom:updated, and if there is any
version tracking or modified dates present to also not update those? Make it
look like some blurred illusion, fading from reality like a bad dream the
next day faster than our rum soaked hangovers?

e.

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From: "A. Pagaltzis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 19:56:41 +0200

* Eric Scheid <[email-masked]> [2005-09-19 19:40]:
> So ... ObAtom ... would recommended practice be to emit the
> garbled enunciations inline, with no change to atom:updated,
> and if there is any version tracking or modified dates present
> to also not update those? Make it look like some blurred
> illusion, fading from reality like a bad dream the next day
> faster than our rum soaked hangovers?

It only has one drawback: if previous entries are presented in
pirate-speak, and then you post new entries meanwhile so that
some of them fall off the bottom of the feed, aggregators which
don’t track versions will keep the pirate-speak version as the
principal one… ugh.

So if you really really really want to deliver all your existing
entries converted to pirate-speak, then make sure that your feed
only grows and does not drop entries, and *keep* it that way for
at least a few days after flipping the switch again.

Considering all this, it would probably be better to restrict
converter pranks to a site’s web browser personality…

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>

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From: James Aylett <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 23:15:47 +0100

On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 03:31:01AM +1000, Eric Scheid wrote:

> enunciations inline, with no change to atom:updated, and if there is
> any version tracking or modified dates present to also not update
> those? Make it look like some blurred illusion, fading from reality
> like a bad dream the next day faster than our rum soaked hangovers?

I think you'd have to just provide an alternative to the entire feed,
labelled in the title somehow. Really it would be nice to do this via
the MIME type, using a language=... parameter to the type, but no such
parameter exists. (And people might laugh at
language=x-piratical-aaargh ... not to mention argue about the number
of 'a's required :-)

James

-- 
/--------------------------------------------------------------------------\
  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  [email-masked]                               uncertaintydivision.org

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From: "James Holderness" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 03:09:56 +0100

My preference would be for a client initiated approach that automatically 
took effect on September the 19th.

A conforming client SHOULD perform an HTTP request for the feed with the 
Accept-Language header set to "en-pirate" (or whatever the standard RFC 3066 
language tag for the pirate dialect of english). A conforming server SHOULD 
return the pirate version of the feed with the Content-Language header set 
to "en-pirate" and/or the xml:lang attribute set to "en-pirate" in the root 
element.

Any feed items that the client had previously received (based on matching 
atom:id and atom:updated elements) MAY be kept as is (i.e. in their original 
source language). However any new messages received would be in the pirate 
dialect.

Future downloads of the feed (after the 19th September) SHOULD return to 
using an Accept-Language header of "en-us" (or whatever the user's prefered 
language), but any messages that had been received on the 19th MAY remain in 
the client database in the pirate dialect (assuming their atom:id and 
atom:updated elements remain unchanged).

IMHO ;)

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From: Walter Underwood <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 20:03:06 -0700

I think we just got a nomination for an April 1 RFC. Nice job.
More accurate than the x-hacker locale on Google, because that
is really still english, not some other "hacker" language.
Besides, they didn't make the spell suggest work in l33t.

wunder

--On September 20, 2005 3:09:56 AM +0100 James Holderness <[email-masked]> wrote:

> A conforming client SHOULD perform an HTTP request for the feed with the Accept-Language header set to "en-pirate" (or whatever the standard RFC 3066 language tag for the pirate dialect of english). A conforming server SHOULD return the pirate version of the feed with the Content-Language header set to "en-pirate" and/or the xml:lang attribute set to "en-pirate" in the root element.

--
Walter Underwood
Principal Software Architect, Verity