Comment Counts in Feeds and Updated Entries
Tim Bray just posted an entry about including a comment count in his atom feed. He said that he soon disabled it as people complained that it meant they saw the entry again as an updated entry. As I’ve recently done the same for my atom feed, I’m confused as to why this is happening. In my case I don’t update either <published> or <updated>, just the <content> element. As the guid never changes, readers shouldn’t consider it updated. Do readers really take a hash of the contents and consider it updated if it changes? Why do readers ignore the date fields. Is this affecting anyone? Certainly, it doesn’t seem to affect Planet or the few readers I’ve tried it on.
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3 comments
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Tim Bray did change the 'updated' date, because he wanted people to see the new comments.
The usual reason for ignoring the dates is that software doesn't manage to fill them in correctly in various random ways (incorrect system clocks if nothing else) so it can be easier to ignore them than try to interoperate.
It affects Liferea. I tend to look at posts that have been updated as they usually have interesting postfixes appended to them.