Re: [search-ws] Say NO to mandatory Atom Feeds

[Farrukh Najmi <farrukh@wellfleetsoftware.com>]

LeVan,Ralph wrote:
>
> 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.
>

I had responded to above issues in an earlier email on this list. See 
recap below...
What do you see as issues in the solution I proposed?

BTW in light of the IPR issues Mary had mentioned and duplicated effort 
I ask that we reconsider usine of zng list
and conduct all TC business on this list on the search-ws-comments list. 
Thanks.

Farrukh Najmi wrote:
Dr R. Sanderson wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress wrote:
>
>> Let's see if this comes out better. A sample response record in ATOM:
>
> As Ross points out, ATOM has some requirements for validation. In 
> particular there's quite a few mandatory elements both at the feed 
> level and the entry level which aren't quite so easy to map into the 
> SRU response while retaining the ATOM semantics, or without adding 
> extra requirements to implementers. For example the updated time for 
> the record.
>
> Rob

There are only a handful of mandatory properties AFAIK.

Implementations typically should know when a record is updated. The 
search-ws spec can specify that implementations that do not have this 
ability use a fixed time that can never be used in reality (e.g. 
1900-00-00T00:00:00Z ).

Other mandatory values like those below can be required to have a value 
of "Unknown" if implementations do not support this.

/atom:feed/atom:entry/atom:title
/atom:feed/atom:author/atom:name
/atom:feed/atom:author/atom:email



-- 
Regards,
Farrukh Najmi

Web: http://www.wellfleetsoftware.com