RE: New URI scheme talk in RSS-land

1.  Subscribe is a better name for it as you suggest 
    although it could confuse people who associate that with 
    mailing lists.

2.  People who click on things are used to getting 
    back a page or opening a dialog.  Autosubscribing 
    based on a click seems like a bad idea.  It doesn't 
    pass the Don't Shock The Monkey test.  It seems like 
    a better idea not to subscribe, but to open a dialog 
    with that value with a Subscribe option on it.  Otherwise, 
    accidental clicks cause problems.  And since some 
    browsers render www.t as a hypertext link control as well, 
    a guessing game goes on regards defaults.

3.  It seems that what you are after is a 
    control to pass a value to the right application and 
    the only way to do that via pushing the data is to 
    push the URI and insist that browsers implement a 
    new control (actually, a new switch in the 
    URI processing code that does something surprising), 
    plus some means to take care of the default behaviors.

It seems like a lot of hassle to get around a cut and 
paste operation to push the feed:/ or subscribe:/ or 
RSS itself to some first class citizen level.  And if 
that exception is made for RSS, why not do it for mailing 
lists?

len


From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@textuality.com]

On Dec 5, 2003, at 1:45 PM, Jan Algermissen wrote:

> Hmm...this confuses me - isnt't dispatching to the right application
> one of the primary uses/purposes of mime-types?
>
>> because the RSS client doesn't need the
>> representation, it needs the URI.
>
> What do you mean by "it needs the URI"?

I mean it needs the URI, because it wants to *subscribe* to the feed, 
i.e. stash the URI away somewhere and do a GET on it regularly to see 
if anything's changed.  I've suggested that in fact this proposed 
scheme shouldn't be named "feed:" it should be named "subscribe:" -Tim

Received on Friday, 5 December 2003 17:13:47 UTC