Re: RSS items order

This is a major problem in my view in the RSS spec - it presents us 
with long and short term immediacy problems.

From this point of view RSS is useless, and it is one of the reasons I 
did not leave syndication to RSS in memeio-xml. No one is using the same 
convention to assign immediacy information to their feeds. That's why 
timestamps sometimes seem screwy on a feed in First Say 
(http://www.firstsay.com).

In the design of the memeio-xml XMLSchema (http://xml.memeio.com) 
I require immediacy fields - and I believe they are essential.
How is discovery of feeds to know any immediacy information about
a feed if it has no reliable timestamp?  The LastModified timestamp
reported in http is not going to help (the time could simply be the
time the file was last copied.  The feed could be five, ten, one
hundred years old and I won't know - in the future, as the 
information system that is the Internet grows, it is a calamity.

Right now immediacy information in RSS, when present, comes in one of 
several timestamps - dc:date, pubDate, lastBuildDate - when it comes 
at all. 

My guess is that most publishers don't really understand what 
immediacy is, why it is important, or what each of these fields 
actually mean.  For example, pubDate and lastBuildDate are not 
either/or, but feeds are containing one and not the other.
I am glad to see that CNN are now using pubDate, but I seem to 
recall they were using lastBuildDate. 
 
None of the fields are required by the RSS spec and the Dublin 
Core tag (dc:date) is simply included out of the blue 
in many cases, often in isolation.  Immediacy fields IMHO
need to be mandatory.

In First Say, when that feed metadata is missing, I take the timestamp 
from the first item in the feed. It works if it is there, 
but it's not ideal, because RSS does not guarantee a cronological 
order of items.

With respect,
Steven
--
Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith

http://www.semeiosis.com
http://www.memeio.com
http://www.firstsay.com



Bill Kearney wrote ..
> There's nothing that controls the sort order.  It's common, however, to
> put the items in a descending sort order; newest at the top.  This is 
> the de facto way for a publisher to dictate what "sort order" they 
> intend the items to be viewed using but there's no way to force it on a
> viewing program. 
> 
> It is, however, a very good idea to include userful timestamps.  If 
> yahoo's ignoring otherwise valid timestamps then that sounds like a bug
> in their implementation.
> 
> What's the feed URL and does it validate reliably?
> 
> -Bill Kearney
> Syndic8.com
> 
> 
> 
> Alex Kolesnichenko wrote:
> 
> >Hello,
> >
> >Are there any constraints on the order of RSS <item> elements? In other
> >words: should they be ordered by the time published? I'm having problems
> >with RSS feeds with no items order: My Yahoo! fails to find latest items
> if
> >the newest item is in the middle of the feed.
> >
> >  
> >
> 
> 
> 
>  
> Yahoo! Groups Links
> 
> 
> 
>  


 
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