snellspace.com

For a variety of reasons, I have decided to close this blog. I will still be blogging on the IBM developerWorks site: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/jasnell.

Minor surgical procedure on Friday went well. Livin’ easy on the Vicodin this weekend. Getting lots of code written tho given that I can’t really get up and do much of anything else yet (~300 test cases so far). Oh, and I finally have my Xbox 360. Might get it set up this evening if I can actually get down and hook it up without being in too much pain.

I’m updating the test cases for my Atom implementation and needed one that covered the feed paging links. These are simple, but I figured others could make use of ‘em also.

Based on feedback on the Atom syntax mailing list, I’m soliciting opinions on whether to go ahead and make the following changes to the Feed Thread draft. If you have a preference, please post a comment (preferably on the atom syntax mailing list) letting me know.

The first change is motivated by a general confusion about what the “id” attribute is identifying. Changing it to “ref” makes it clear that the attribute is a reference to some other thing.

The second change is motivated by concerns over fitting in with Atom’s defined extension model which does not allow for extensions on the link element (a big mistake, IMHO, but one we have to live with).

Robert Sayre: “I don’t care about the attribute name. I think the extension attributes on the link are a PITA compared to the slash:comments approach. How do I display that in a client? Do I add up the numbers? Pick the highest? Do I pick the latest or the earliest time?”

Good question: the answer is whatever you want. They values are strictly advisory. Syntactic sugar that can safely be ignored. Consume them however you want to consume them (or choose to ignore them and use slash:comments instead). Over time, feed consumers will figure out the best way to use the metadata, and, in the end, if they prove to be less than useful, the fact that they’re optional makes them very easy to ignore.