Network Working Group M. Nottingham Internet-Draft June 30, 2005 Expires: January 1, 2006 Feed History: Enabling Stateful Syndication draft-nottingham-atompub-feed-history-01 Status of this Memo By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents that any applicable patent or other IPR claims of which he or she is aware have been or will be disclosed, and any of which he or she becomes aware will be disclosed, in accordance with Section 6 of BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on January 1, 2006. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2005). Abstract This document specifies mechanisms that allow feed publishers to give hints about the nature of the feed's statefulness, and a means of retrieving "missed" entries from a stateful feed. 1. Introduction Syndication documents (e.g., those in formats such as Atom and RSS) usually only contain the last several entries in a longer-lived channel (or "feed") of information. Often, consuming software keeps Nottingham Expires January 1, 2006 [Page 1] Internet-Draft Feed History June 2005 copies of all entries that have been previously seen, effectively keeping a history of the feed's contents. However, not all feeds benefit from this practice; in some, old entries are not relevant to the current contents of the feed. For example, it's not desireable to keep history in this manner with a "top ten" feed; showing old entries would imply that the previous number one is now number eleven, and so forth. Feeds that encourage this practice have a different problem. If consuming software does not poll often enough, some entries may be missed, causing them to be silently omitted. For some applications, this is a serious error on its own. Even in non-critical applications, this phenomenon can cause publishers to make Feed Documents contain more entries than reasonably necessary, just to assure that consumers have an amply large window in which to reconstruct the feed's state. This document specifies mechanisms that allow feed publishers to give hints as to the nature of the feed with regard to state, and a means of retrieving "missed" entries from a stateful feed. Although it refers to Atom normatively, the mechanisms described herein can be used with similar syndication formats, such as the various flavours of RSS. 2. Notational Conventions The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14, [RFC2119], as scoped to those conformance targets. In this specification, "subscription document" refers to an Atom Feed Document or similar syndication format (e.g., RSS) that is intended to be subscribed to; i.e., it contains the most recent entries available in the feed. In this specification, "archive document" refers to an Atom Feed Document or similar syndication format (e.g., RSS) that is archived; i.e., the set of entries inside it does not change over time. Note that some entries in the archive document may also be present in the subscription document; in other words, some (but not necessarily all) "live" entries might already be archived. In this specification, "head section" refers to the children of a feed document's document-wide metadata container; e.g., the child elements of the atom:feed element in an Atom Feed Document. Nottingham Expires January 1, 2006 [Page 2] Internet-Draft Feed History June 2005 This specification uses XML Namespaces to uniquely identify XML element names. It uses the following namespace prefix for the indicated namespace URI; "fh": [[TBD]] This specification uses terms from the XML Infoset. However, this specification uses a shorthand; the phrase "Information Item" is omitted when naming Element Information Items. Therefore, when this specification uses the term "element," it is referring to an Element Information Item in Infoset terms. 3. The 'fh:stateful' Element The fh:stateful element indicates whether the Feed is stateful, and MAY occur in a subscription document's head section. Its content MUST be either "true" or "false". Whitespace in its content MUST be ignored by processors. For example, true If the content of the fh:stateful element is "false", it indicates that the subscription document is a complete representation of the entire feed; previous entries SHOULD NOT be considered part of the feed by consumers. For example, a feed that represents a ranking that varies over time, such as "Top Twenty Records" or "Most Popular Items" should be marked with a fh:stateful element containing "false". If the content of the fh:stateful element is "true", it indicates that the subscription document is a potentially partial representation of the entire feed; previous entries MUST be considered part of the feed by consumers. For example, a feed that represents a chronological list, such as "ExampleCo Press Releases" or "Widget Project Updates" should be marked with a fh:stateful element containing "true". A subscription document whose fh:stateful element contains "true" MUST contain a fh:prev element, unless there are no previous entries in the feed. A subscription document whose fh:stateful element contains "false" MUST NOT contain a fh:prev element. Nottingham Expires January 1, 2006 [Page 3] Internet-Draft Feed History June 2005 4. The 'fh:prev' Element The fh:prev element conveys the location of an archive of previous entries in the feed, and MAY occur in a subscription document's head section. It MUST occur in an archive document's head section, unless there are no previous entries in the feed. Its content MUST be a URI reference indicating the previous archive document's location. For example, http://www.example.com/feed/archive/2005/05 5. State Reconstruction When presented with a partial representation of a feed, a consumer MAY reconstruct the entire feed in a local store by following these steps, starting with the subscription document as the current document: 1. Add all of the entries in the current document to the store. 2. Dereference the fh:prev URI, if present. If it is not present, stop processing. 3. Using the dereferenced archive document as the current document, start at step one (i.e., apply these steps recursively). An implementation MAY stop when it encounters an fh:prev URI whose entries have been successfully stored beforehand when following this process. Note that implementations MAY cache archive documents and/or use a different method of reconstructing state, as long as the result is the same as that achieved by following these steps. User-Agents SHOULD warn when they do not have the complete state of a feed (e.g., by alerting the user that an archive document is unavailable, or inserting pseudo-entries that inform the user that some entries may be missing). Note that publishers are not required to make all archive documents available. Nottingham Expires January 1, 2006 [Page 4] Internet-Draft Feed History June 2005 6. Examples Atom Subscription Document with History Example Feed 2003-12-13T18:30:02Z John Doe urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b93C-0003939e0af6 true http://example.org/2003/11/index.atom Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a 2003-12-13T18:30:02Z Some text in a new, fresh entry. Nottingham Expires January 1, 2006 [Page 5] Internet-Draft Feed History June 2005 Atom Archive Document with History Example Feed 2003-11-24T12:00:00Z John Doe urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b93C-0003939e0af6 http://example.org/2003/10/index.atom Atom-Powered Robots Scheduled To Run Amok urn:uuid:cd3272ef-b09c-42fd-806b-e25580e59b39 2003-11-24T12:00:00Z Some text from an old, different entry. Nottingham Expires January 1, 2006 [Page 6] Internet-Draft Feed History June 2005 RSS 2.0 Subscription Document with History Liftoff News http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/ Liftoff to Space Exploration. en-us Tue, 10 Jun 2003 04:00:00 GMT Tue, 10 Jun 2003 09:41:01 GMT http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Weblog Editor 2.0 editor@example.com webmaster@example.com true http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/2003/05/feed.rss> Star City http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/2003/06/news-starcity How do Americans get ready to work with Russians aboard the International Space Station? They take a crash course in culture, language and protocol at Russia's Star City. Tue, 03 Jun 2003 09:39:21 GMT http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/2003/06/03.html#item573 Nottingham Expires January 1, 2006 [Page 7] Internet-Draft Feed History June 2005 RSS 2.0 Archive Document with History Liftoff News http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/ Liftoff to Space Exploration. en-us Tue, 30 May 2003 08:00:00 GMT Tue, 30 May 2003 10:31:52 GMT http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Weblog Editor 2.0 editor@example.com webmaster@example.com true http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/2003/04/feed.rss> Sky watchers in Europe, Asia, and parts of Alaska and Canada will experience a partial eclipse of the Sun on Saturday, May 31st. Fri, 30 May 2003 11:06:42 GMT http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/2003/05/30.html#item572 The Engine That Does More http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/2003/05/news-VASIMR.asp Before man travels to Mars, NASA hopes to design new engines that will let us fly through the Solar System more quickly. The proposed VASIMR engine would do that. Tue, 27 May 2003 08:37:32 GMT http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/2003/05/27.html#item571 7. Security Considerations Feeds using the mechanisms described here could be crafted in such a way as to cause a User-Agent to initiate excessive (or even an unending sequence of) network requests, causing denial of service (either to the User-Agent, the target server, and/or intervening networks). This risk can be mitigated by requiring user intervention after a certain number of requests, or by limiting requests either according to a hard limit, or with heuristics. Nottingham Expires January 1, 2006 [Page 8] Internet-Draft Feed History June 2005 User-Agents should be mindful of resource limits when storing feed state; to reiterate, they are not required to always store or reconstruct feed state when conforming to this specification; they only need inform the user when state is partial. 8. Normative References [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997. Author's Address Mark Nottingham Email: mnot@pobox.com URI: http://www.mnot.net/ Nottingham Expires January 1, 2006 [Page 9] Internet-Draft Feed History June 2005 Intellectual Property Statement The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any Intellectual Property Rights or other rights that might be claimed to pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in this document or the extent to which any license under such rights might or might not be available; nor does it represent that it has made any independent effort to identify any such rights. Information on the procedures with respect to rights in RFC documents can be found in BCP 78 and BCP 79. 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Disclaimer of Validity This document and the information contained herein are provided on an "AS IS" basis and THE CONTRIBUTOR, THE ORGANIZATION HE/SHE REPRESENTS OR IS SPONSORED BY (IF ANY), THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Copyright Statement Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2005). This document is subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions contained in BCP 78, and except as set forth therein, the authors retain all their rights. Acknowledgment Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the Internet Society. Nottingham Expires January 1, 2006 [Page 10]