Re: Clarification of as:published?

AS2's use of published and updated has been adopted from AS1 which
adopted it from Atom. I've never been particularly happy with the
definitions. That said, "published" is the original timestamp of the
object creation/publication. It's not intended to be modified at any
point after that initial creation. "updated" is even more ambiguous,
but it's supposed to signal the timestamp of any updates on the
original object.

We can likely do better but these have a fairly well established use
that carries over from Atom. I'm open to suggestions for improvements.

On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 3:34 PM, Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Again, sorry in advance to be both naive and pedantic, a terrible
> affliction.
>
> The `published` term is defined as "The date and time at which the object
> was published", and is used reasonably frequently in examples in -core.  The
> intent in those examples appears to be along the lines of when the object
> was created or most recently modified, or when the activity that generated
> the object occurred.
>
> In Example 6 / Section 2.3, it seems like the timestamp for when the Like
> user activity occurred, which might be the time that the object was created,
> and that might be the same time that the object's serialization was first
> published.  In a distributed hybrid online/offline those timestamps could be
> different between creating client and initial publishing server, and further
> very different between initial server and any harvesting/republishing
> server.
>
> Assuming an interaction model similar to RSS/Atom's, where the post is
> published and then aggregated by further feeds, I think in that case the
> published timestamp should remain the same?  If that's true, then the
> definition could be modified to say something like:
>
> The date and time at which the object was first created or subsequently
> updated by its original publisher
>
> Then if a client wants to have a certain timestamp, it can add it for the
> server to make available. If not then the server can add it when it receives
> it, and it would then become set for other aggregating streams.
>
> I would propose not to be explicit about "object" vs "description of object"
> ;) #httprange14
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Rob
>
> --
> Rob Sanderson
> Information Standards Advocate
> Digital Library Systems and Services
> Stanford, CA 94305

Received on Thursday, 5 November 2015 02:37:38 UTC