[whatwg] Removing the need for separate feeds

[Eduard Pascual]

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 9:21 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Fri, 22 May 2009, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> On May 22, 2009, at 09:01, Ian Hickson wrote:
>> >
>> >   USE CASE: Remove the need for feeds to restate the content of HTML pages
>> >   (i.e. replace Atom with HTML).
>>
>> Did you do some kind of "Is this Good for the Web?" analysis on this
>> one? That is, do things get better if there's yet another feed format?
>
> As far as I can tell, things get better if the feed format and the default
> output format are the same, yes. Generally, redundant information has
> tended to lead to problems.
IMO, feeds are the exception to confirm the rule. While redundant
*source* information easily leads to problems, for what I have seen
the sites using feeds tend to be almost always dynamic: both the HTML
pages and the feeds are generated via server scripts from the *same
set of source data*, normally from a database. This is especially true
for blogs, and any other CMS-based site, since CMSs normally rely a
lot on databases and server-side scripting. So on these cases we don't
actually have redundant information, but just multiple ways to
retrieve the same information.
For manually authored pages and feeds things would be different; but
are there really a significant ammount of such cases out there? I
can't say I have seen the entire web (who can?), but among what I have
seen, I have never encountered any hand authored feed, except for code
examples and similar "experimental" stuff.

Regards,
Eduard Pascual