Say NO to mandatory Atom Feeds

I’ve been giving more thought to SRU responses and have come to the conclusion that the Atom Feed document should not be a mandatory response format and should certainly not be the sole mandatory response format.

The problem is that Atom Feeds were not intended for dynamically generated search results and have mandatory elements that are important for syndicated blog feeds but are meaningless for us. Specifically, they are the author, id and updated elements required on every response. I can live with the mandatory title element, but the others don’t work.

I’m still interested in figuring out how to use Atom Feeds as a possible alternative response. It is clear that there are applications that want to use them. I just hope that their assumption that they’ve just gotten a list of blog entries from me matches up with the user’s expectation that they just got a list of documents.

Ralph

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