Subject: Feed History: stateful -> incremental?

From: Mark Nottingham <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 15:07:15 -0700

Just bouncing an idea around; it seems that there's a fair amount of  
confusion / fuzziness caused by the term 'stateful'. Would people  
prefer the term 'incremental'?

I.e., instead of a "stateful feed", it would be an "incremental  
feed"; fh:stateful would become fh:incremental.

Worth it?

--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/

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From: Stefan Eissing <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 12:00:52 +0200

Am 25.08.2005 um 00:07 schrieb Mark Nottingham:
> I.e., instead of a "stateful feed", it would be an "incremental feed"; 
> fh:stateful would become fh:incremental.

I would prefer to name such a feed a "chunked" feed. So, that would 
make it fh:chunked=(true|false).

That leaves the "history" analogy a bit behind, I'm afraid. So a 
"chunked feed" would be a history if "fh:order=publish-time"? Maybe not 
worth it, just a thought.

I see one use of feed histories in making normal feed documents very 
small and still being able to offer a rather long list of entries. 
Clients checking for updates would just get a tiny document (2 entries 
maybe) iff they do not use HTTP caching or ETag validation. Could this 
be some transfer-volume saver?

//Stefan

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From: Ian Davis <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 11:22:11 +0100

> fh:stateful would become fh:incremental.

What about "partial"?

Ian

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From: Antone Roundy <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 09:52:31 -0600

> fh:stateful would become fh:incremental.
I think it's worth seeing if a term can be found that has a more 
intuitively understandable meaning.  It might be helpful to explore the 
kinds of names that describe non-stateful feeds too--if a better term 
can be found for that, it could be used instead (and just reverse true 
& false).  Brainstorming a little:

Stateful: sliding window, most recent segment, segment, stream, entry 
stream, appendable, appending, augmentable, augmenting

Non-stateful: uh...stateful? ("what you just downloaded represents the 
current state of the entire feed"), current state, current, snapshot, 
fixed entry, set entry, replacable, replacing, entry replacing, 
non-appending, non-augmenting

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From: Mark Nottingham <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 09:12:13 -0700

On 25/08/2005, at 3:00 AM, Stefan Eissing wrote:

>> Just bouncing an idea around; it seems that there's a fair amount  
>> of confusion / fuzziness caused by the term 'stateful'. Would  
>> people prefer the term 'incremental'?

Hmm. I tend to shy away from 'chunked', because that already has  
meaning in HTTP, and while the format isn't dependant upon HTTP, it  
might get confusing (witness "bindings" and "properties" in the Web  
services world).

> "chunked feed" would be a history if "fh:order=publish-time"? Maybe  
> not worth it, just a thought.

I totally see an ordering extension being useful, but I think it's  
orthogonal to fh.

> I see one use of feed histories in making normal feed documents  
> very small and still being able to offer a rather long list of  
> entries. Clients checking for updates would just get a tiny  
> document (2 entries maybe) iff they do not use HTTP caching or ETag  
> validation. Could this be some transfer-volume saver?

Hopefully. I think one of the reasons people publish such big feeds  
right now is that they want to make sure people will see entries if  
they haven't checked in a while.

Cheers,

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From: James M Snell <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 09:08:22 -0700

Just brainstorming... (hey, I already threw out one harebrained idea 
this week, what's one more?)

Perhaps something as simple as a single empty element (like fh:archive) 
that describes the general behavior of the feed.

e.g. <sliding />  or  <snapshot />

<feed>
  <fh:sliding />    <!-- indicates that the feed is a sliding window -->
</feed>

<feed>
  <fh:snapshot />  <!-- indicates that the feed represents a snapshot of 
a collection -->
</feed>

- James

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From: Stefan Eissing <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 19:10:25 +0200

> might get confusing (witness "bindings" and "properties" in the Web 

Seeing it as a data structure "fh" introduces a single-linked list of 
documents which the whole feed is composed of. I think such a document 
needs its own term.

A single document could be named a "feed fragement". The first document 
"head fragment"? Not very snappy. Let's see. If the whole feed is atom, 
then the fragments are "particals"? "feedytrons"? Are we perhaps 
talking about a "split feed" (fh:split=true/false? the german term for 
a fragment is "splitter", btw.)

It has been a long day, i should stop now.

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From: Mark Nottingham <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2005 10:52:28 -0700

On 25/08/2005, at 10:10 AM, Stefan Eissing wrote:
> Seeing it as a data structure "fh" introduces a single-linked list  
> of documents which the whole feed is composed of. I think such a  
> document needs its own term.
>
> A single document could be named a "feed fragement". The first  
> document "head fragment"? Not very snappy. Let's see. If the whole  
> feed is atom, then the fragments are "particals"? "feedytrons"? Are  
> we perhaps talking about a "split feed" (fh:split=true/false? the  
> german term for a fragment is "splitter", btw.)

That's one thing to be named. I was trying to come up with a term for  
the whole, conceptual feed (that indicates its components have this  
nature); that's why I came up with "incremental."

I.e., in usage: "That's a foo feed; you can walk back its previous  
elements and build the whole feed." And, "That's not a foo feed; the  
document you fetch is the whole feed."

"Incremental" works pretty well there (although it has a lot of  
syllables); "sliding" (as suggested by James) also fits, but it is a  
bit evocative of time, which I'd like to avoid (despite the use of  
'history' in the document title :-/).

(BTW, "incremental" isn't my term; it was suggested privately by an  
implementor)

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From: James M Snell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 22:34:47 -0700

> 'history' in the document title :-/).
And "incremental" isn't evocative of time ;-) ;-)

Either way, It definitely works better than "stateful". 

- James