We are in the process of getting rid of the unnecessary boiler plate in
our standard.  I do not want to see it replaced with new boiler plate
that has even less value than the old.

I would be happy with a proposal that we just ignore those mandatory
elements, but I will not be putting in bogus values just to satisfy a
meaningless requirement.

Ralph

-----Original Message-----
From: SRU (Search and Retrieve Via URL) Implementors
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Farrukh Najmi
Sent: Monday, December 03, 2007 2:28 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Say NO to mandatory Atom Feeds

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 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?

> 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.
>



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